The New Year is a great time to revisit things like strategy. You do have one right? I mean, you don’t just go about frantically implementing the “marketing tactic of the week do you?”

If small business owner do have any hint of a marketing strategy it is usually something safe, immune to criticism, and easily defended by something like – that’s what everyone else in our industry does.

Want to know how to make 2007 the best year yet for your business. Ask yourself some questions about your business, your industry that no one thought of asking before. What if you really did look at your business in a completely new way, what would this original thought mean?

Have you ever worked somewhere and the new guy (undampened by bland sameness) says something like, “why don’t we do it this way?” Everyone rolls their eyes and that’s that, right?

What ever happened to your imagination, your poet. Get it back damn it! Ask new questions.

Can you package something differently? Can you combine several businesses into one? Do you need a business partner? Should you even be in this industry? Can you change your target market? Can you steal a killer idea from another industry? Oh, I know, can you finally made marketing as important to your day to day routine as it should be?

Strategy before tactics – the right new questions before strategy.

Here are 5 new habits you must “get” in the coming year if you intend to replace your current marketing blueprint with an abundant marketing blueprint.

Get Uncomfortable! - Your wealth, your marketing success, will correspond directly with the size of your marketing mindset. Get in front of an audience and speak, write for an industry publication, start blogging, network with prospects, write personal thank you notes. You can’t grow unless you are uncomfortable. Write a book. Start a radio show. Create a podcast. You are so much bigger than you are allowing yourself to be. Reach.

Get and Give New Skills – Read everything about marketing you put your hands on. (Perhaps starting with Duct Tape Marketing!) Read your direct mail, watch infomercials, read magazines that cover marketing and “this is a big one” look for ways to teach others how to market and promote their businesses. Become known in your industry for your marketing expertise and show others how to do it – how to get the marketing mindset.

Get Bigger Ideas – Tear your products and services apart. Look for ways to approach an industry problem like know one else can or will. Your ideas don’t have to really be that big as long as they are world altering. Come up with one idea this year that makes someone say you are nuts – and then go do it.

Get Value - No matter what you offer, it can be better. Heap more and more on your products and services, give stuff that no one expected you to give. Add services over and above what was agreed upon. Makes people talk about how incredible you are.

Get What You’re Worth – If you do the above, you can do this. Raise your prices. Choose to work with fewer clients at much higher rates. Sell based on value, not on time. And, refuse to work with clients that don’t fully appreciate the value you have to offer. You can make more space in your head to serve your clients when you don’t have clients that bring you down.

The story of Springfield Remanufacturing as told by Jack Stack is the stuff of legends. Stack and a group of employees decided to buy the company they worked for instead of letting the company shut down and send them packing. Problem was, the group had to borrow about 99% or money and figure out how to actually run a company no body else wanted.

I had a great visit with Stack on a recent edition of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.

The entire story, including the incredible transformation, in chronicled in a book by Stack and co author Bo Burlingham titled the Great Game of Business. The great game that Stack and his counterparts created was what is now generally referred to as “Open Book Management.” Open book management is a management strategy that opens the financial books for all in the company to see, understand and take a stake in. While thought to be almost radical when Stack did it, it still scares folks in many a corporate suite.

Springfield Remanufacturing, now the wildly successful SRC Holdings, was so successful with their great game of open book management that, as word got out about it, folks started showing up from all around the world to see what was going there. Eventually the company created a formal training program and platform to teach the great game and allow others to teach it as well. Check out the Great Game

I had a great conversation with one of the nicest, most humble multi millionaires and business leaders you will even want to meet. If you’re ever in Springfield Missouri, stop on by and look Jack up. There’s a good chance he will be down on the shop floor teaching someone how to properly interpret a balance sheet.