We all need it. We all know we need it. And every year it seems fewer of us do it. Take vacations, that is.

Only 59 percent of 626 small-business owners polled nationwide said they plan to take at least one week off this year, according to an American Express Small Business Monitor reported in Inc. That’s down from an average of 67 percent over the last four years.

And when many go, it’s hardly a real getaway. Three-quarters of bosses admitted they’ll be checking in at work at least once a day, while 32 percent confessed they’ll check in several times a day. Owners worry:

• Service will deteriorate
  
• Employees will make stupid mistakes and poor judgment calls
  
• Employees will just slack off and nothing will get done.
  

Employees, too, shun vacations so they can keep their noses to the grindstone. Even though many say they’re burned out, nearly half didn’t take all of the vacation days they were entitled to last year, according to a survey conducted by Yahoo Hot Jobs. Top reasons:

• Too much work to do (36 percent),
  
• Too expensive (34 percent)
  
• Saving vacation time for emergencies (32 percent).

What’s up with this? Are we addicted to work (or perhaps the goodies that money buys)? Is it ego? You know: “I’m far too important to leave. This whole place would collapse if I weren’t there holding it all together!”

Europeans, who routinely get 5-6 weeks holiday per year, seem to have a very different attitude toward work. They laugh at us and think it’s foolish to pass up any vacation time.

What about you? What’s your attitude toward work? Vacation?

Hype is always a temptation when talking or writing about your company or services. Puffing up your features and benefits may seem like a good way to set yourself apart from the competition. But too much hype hurts you in the long run, when people realize that their expectations — the ones you set with your marketing — haven’t been met.

The role of marketing is not to jack up a prospect’s expectations, but to manage their expectations realistically. We’ve all seen those breathless sales letters — online or in print — that promise the moon but inevitably disappoint. (Here’s a very funny spoof of them.) You don’t want to be one of those businesses, do you?

Personally, I believe that honesty always trumps hype in the long run. A University of Georgia study confirms that people really notice when they feel worse than they expected to, i.e., when the outcome doesn’t quite meet your blue-sky promises.

The moral: Make sure you (or your copywriter) don’t set customer expectations so high that you can’t meet them. After all, hype might help you close that first sale, but profit comes from renewals, referrals and ongoing purchases. Think about the lifetime value of your customer — not just the quick buck.

As Guy put it, “It sure looks like ‘under promising and over delivering’ is the way to go.” Amen.

What’s your opinion of hype? Has it worked for you?

Maybe your problem isn’t attracting more customers. Maybe you’ve already got plenty. Maybe what you really need is something new, something different to sell to all those customers.

Introducing ProductBlazer, a free search engine designed to help you identify new products and locate wholesale suppliers. According to Inc.:

“ProductBlazer pulls together more than 26,000 innovative products and indexes suppliers’ websites, so all those goodies are searchable with a single engine.

The site groups offerings by broad categories (Apparel, Automotive, Electronics, etc.) then each is broken down into subcategories. Click on any link takes you to the supplier’s site, with PB active in a top frame. (Remember frames?) You can click “Save Supplier” to note them in your PB account.

The service is free for both retailers and suppliers, who can sign up for a free listing. And yes, it’s peppered with AdSense ads, which also compete for attention.

How about you? Where do you find great new products? Or do you always roll your own?

You should, you know. Everyone is busy, distracted, only half-listening. They’re quite likely to miss your marketing message the first time (or two).

Business Week’s Michelle Nichols says offering your customer the same information in different ways can help get your message across and close the sale.

Her sales tips (paraphrased by me):

• Listen for repeated complaints from customers. Then zero in on those pain points and how your product or service can solve them. Ignore the other great benefits you deliver — they’re not that important to this customer.
• Repeat your benefits. After you’ve heard your customer complain several times, it’s time to create a pitch that repeats how your proposed solution solves their problem.
• Repeat your prospecting calls. It’s more effective to call repeatedly on a smaller, targeted list than to make only one sales call each to a larger audience.
• Encourage repeat customers.
• Repeat and reinforce the benefits that will mean the most to this customer. (Oh, did I already mention that?)

“You know the really hard thing about writing? You not only have to think up all the words, you have to put them in the right order.”

Here’s one sure way to attract a certain kind of customer: Topless car wash. For a few bucks more, you get a lap dance, too.

The Bubbles ‘n’ Babes car wash in Brisbane prompted a flood of complaints with a topless car wash for A$55 ($45) and a nude car wash with X-rated lap-dance service for A$100. “If it was approved for a car wash then I can’t imagine how we can stop them,” Lord Mayor Campbell Newman told a council meeting with worried local lawmakers.

Professional car washes are booming in drought-stricken Australian cities because residents are banned from washing their own cars due to tough water restrictions. Bubbles ‘n’ Babes uses recycled water to squeak by the regs.

And the best we seem to be able to do here in the US is getting our windshields smeared by a derelict at a stop light — whether you want him to or not.

Well, not quite. But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has opened the gates of its vaunted curriculum to the masses — no charge, no registration required. (No degree either, of course.)

MIT OpenCourseWare is an ambitious project to post all MIT courses on the Internet, open to anyone who’s interested. A “free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world,” MIT OCW requires no registration, grants no degrees or certificates, and provides no access to MIT faculty. All it does is open the doors to a great fr’ee education. All you add is time and effort.

Over 1500 courses are already available and more are coming.

Want to to change the direction of your life and career? As a recent New York Times column (written by a former attorney) points out, sometimes all it takes is a single non-credit course.

Sure, you can sit in classrooms for 16+ years, but no one can give you an education. Like Abraham Lincoln, you have to go get it for yourself.