Every business exists to provide a product or service to prospective customers, client, patients or one that already exist.

In order to remain in business you must take a critical view of what you do and how you do it in order to stay competitive in today's marketplace. Business that fail to change over time end up failing and wondering why.

There was a wholesale distributor that began by selling digitizer tablets to designers and engineers in the mid 1980's. Had they closed their eyes to what was going on around them they would have never added video boards, then large format monitors, gaiming video boards, flat panel displays, high definition plasma displays, LCDs, projectors and so forth. Each step along the path over more than twenty years it was important to understand trends and technology, adopting and discarding along the way.

Marketing is the process that generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.

Marketing is used to identify the customer, satisfy the customer, and keep the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, marketing management is one of the major components of business management.

Sales is the process that facilitates the transfer of ownership or value from you to your customer or client. Sales methods in business vary greatly, however the single most important aspect is that a prospective buyer is matched with a solution to to his or her issue for which a solution is being sought.

There is a school of thought that promotes that by effectively bringing more customers "through the door" and enticing them into contact, sales organizations can dramatically improve their results, efficiency, profitability, and allow salespeople to provide a drastically higher level of customer service and satisfaction, instead of spending the majority of their working hours searching for someone to sell to.

Administration is all the other activities that consume your time, talents and energy that you wish you could use on the your product, service, marketing and sales. They include but are not limited to dealing with employees (hiring, firing, managing), management, accounting, systems, banking, finance, training, leadership, facilities, payroll taxes, sales taxes, not to mention a work / life balance.

All are important and need to be done. The question is more who needs to be doing them, when and how? You are the owner of the business you have because at one time, you had a passion for your product and service, administration is a passion killer. How do successful business owners deal with all this administration and maintain their passion?