The conventional wisdom in business about feedback is that it’s very important and you must always listen to it and act upon it. Which is all very well and good, but like all conventional wisdom can be a little simplistic. This isn’t my experience of how the real business world works.

I like to share some of my bag of tips and tricks which I use with my clients, so here’s one which I suggest regularly.

I’ve noticed something about the way that I work. If I can concentrate on what I’m doing, I can get a whole day’s worth of work done in about an hour. Millions of items (well, about 3 or 4) can be ticked off the to do list when I’m in the zone. But if I’m not focussed, my productivity drops dramatically, and my day disappears. So I’ve been trying a new time management technique – the pomodoro technique.

I’ve noticed over the years that about 60% of my clients are women business owners. But this is far higher than the proportion of female business owners generally – about 15% of businesses are owned outright by women, and another 20% of businesses are co-owned by women. So why do I get more women than men?

Lots of my business support clients are busy people. We’re all busy people. But sometimes being busy stops us getting things done. There are lots of resources out there for managing your time better and I don’t want to just duplicate those, but to encourage you to do something other than work on your business for a change.

Sometimes your customers aren’t on your doorstep or they’re difficult to reach. If you’re selling to corporates, or in a specialised area, you need an in depth strategy. And even if you are building up a good network around you, you still need to be able to target the right people. So here are some ideas on how to do that.