Think about your own responses to the advertising and promotions you receive. Much of it probably goes right past you, deflected instinctively and even unconsciously by your Ad Filtering System. Yet some messages resonate with you. They connect somehow, in ways that you're not even aware of, and you respond to the...
What’s more important to you? A one-time purchase, or a customer with a long-term relationship with your business? Customers-for-life is the strategy and the hope behind all great brands.
We define business frustrations as a series of specific recurring events in your business over which you feel you have little or no control.
Almost every business owner wants more leads for their business. In fact, for many owners the need for a constant inflow of qualified leads often dominates their thinking. There are, however, many challenges to ensuring and maintaining that supply. And, in addition to the needs of today, growth objectives and prof...
The first step in any successful endeavor is defining what a win will look like once the project is complete. When an artist begins a painting, he typically has a vision in his mind of what the painting will look like when it is finished. When a football team takes the field, they know the definition of success—a ...
Hiring new employees is always challenging; but recruiting and hiring salespeople is even more challenging. The process is rife with great rewards along with potential pitfalls. What follows is both an introduction to the process involved in hiring high performing sales staff, but also a leaping off point for you ...
Lewis and Clark, Sears and Roebuck, Hewlett-Packard, the Wright Brothers. What do these names all have in common? Aside from being almost universally recognized, they were also incredibly successful partners. Despite the seeming preponderance of advice on the challenges and pitfalls of having a business partner, t...
If you want something done correctly, you’ve got to do it yourself, right? That’s a wonderful philosophy if you want to create a lot of work for yourself. But if you want to create a business that works for you, you can’t do it alone. You’ve got to enable other people to do at least some of that work—and you’ve go...
Owning and operating a business isn’t something you take lightly. It requires a huge leap of faith. It’s exciting to live your entrepreneurial dream but it's also innately scary because there's no guarantee you'll succeed.
I am a family physician in Old Saybrook, CT. After being in a group of four doctors for twenty-five years who had no desire or ability to deal with the business side of the practice, the practice dissolved. This required that we had to capitalize the dissolution with our families money. After 25 years of hard work...
In 1995, I was 24 years old and I had the opportunity to buy a martial arts school from the Master I was originally training with. The school was a year old when I took it over, and at the time the monthly revenue was about the same as the rent so I quickly realized that I needed to institute some things that woul...
There are a lot of things marketing automation software can do for you. It can help you increase traffic, educate and inspire potential customers, and give you a microscopic view of what happens at every step of your buyer’s journey. But like all good things, it’s not quite that simple. It takes a real investment ...
Is your blog getting you down? Do you wonder whether it’s worth all the effort, whether people are really getting something from it, whether you’re “doing it right”? Maybe you think you’re not a writer, or you simply feel like you don’t have the time to write with all the other demands of your small business.
Working with people you have personal relationships with can be a wonderful thing. And it often doesn't turn out that way. It can easily get 'complicated' when you're trying to juggle two kinds of relationships with the same person. And while it's easy enough to say 'just be yourself', we all know that when it com...
Little gets our entrepreneurial spirits soaring like the vision of ourselves as the CEO of a successful startup. Whether you’re brand new to business or a serial entrepreneur, the allure of starting out from nothing and then building a world-class business is a thrilling concept. But we can’t ignore the risks. Sta...
Passion and drive go a long way. There were 5,000 little things you did to survive in the face of long odds of small business success - the late nights, juggling expenses, praying for new customers. You leaned on that passion and drive to get through - and it worked.
Most business leaders and professionals lead with their head. It mostly works, and nobody will criticize you for it (usually because that’s the way they do it). But you’re paying a huge price every day in the form of stress, stagnation and self-doubt, in ways you might not realize. Leading by heart is a whole othe...