I had been in the copy business for 18 years. My husband was in sales in the same industry for 10. I was looking for a new challenge, and we decided it was the right time to do this for ourselves. We named it after the place we enjoyed our honeymoon, and it has become much more than a name. Every year we take a fe...
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...
Why you're frustrated and what to do about it Employee turnover. Customer complaints. Unplanned expenses. Competition everywhere you look. Pain in the neck vendors. An endless string of new technologies you’re supposed to learn how to use. Social #%?@! media. It’s enough to make you want to go get a job. This isn’...
You’re always looking for new ways to grow. But the trap most owners fall into is that they spend too much time figuring what they’re going to do, and not enough on what they’re not. It’s the ‘secret ingredient’ to our 6 step planning process—the simplest way we know to figure out where you want to go and what nee...
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...
I've been working with a client who was struggling with self-organization and time-management. After our last meeting, he took it upon himself to create a weekly list and make note of all of the different projects, initiatives, conversations, and people that he was avoiding in his business that built up during the...
You need to get out there and be 'social' as the business owner, right? Getting active on Twitter, LinkedIn, to tell your story and be transparent–that's all the rage. And while it might be good advice, there are some crucial nuances that we rarely pause to think about in terms of what's actually in the best inter...
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...
What if you've already found your tribe without knowing it? It's worth considering, because they're probably sending you a message about your product or service that you can easily miss if you don't listen carefully. This was true for us, and we're learning some incredible things from our 'tribe', things that migh...
There are infinite possibilities for titles and positions in your business, but there are really only three kinds of relationships between any two of them. And understanding the dynamics of these three relationships - which are, more than anything, power dynamics - is critical to the professional development of yo...
I was at a seminar a long time ago, and the presenter, who was a jerk but had a good sense of humor, was trying to help a young man struggling to find himself. "Let me ask you something ... do you have parents?" he asked. A bit stunned, the young man replied "Um, yeah ... why?" "I'm not surprised," he quipped, ".....
Being a business owner means more than owning the company. You're also a business leader - whether you have a 50-person team, or you're a solopreneur. Right now, by design or by accident, you're setting the direction and tone of everything your company does. It takes a crisis for most business owners to start acti...
The kind of angel your business needs probably isn't the kind with new investment, but the kind with something much more important. What this other kind of angel can give you is a new perspective - a way of looking at things that you can't see when you're stuck in the weeds.
It's just not true anymore. The tools that are available today can let you do just that, and in ways you might not have thought of. The challenge of running a small business has always been to get it out of your head, out of your hands, and into a consistent and repeatable experience that every customer has, no ma...
Shouldn't business coaches have a great business of their own? How much can they really help you if they're teaching but not doing? And by doing, I mean working on their business the way they say you should be working on yours.
"Values" have gone viral, and not necessarily in a good way. The process of discovering and clarifying your values and building your business based on them is a deeply personal one, but the cynical marketers among us have other designs. If they have their way, and they will, saying you have 'strong core values' wi...
Time management is painful: real leaders do it anyway. We all want to feel good, and not feel bad. So we prefer that change be comfortable. Sometimes it is. Most of the time it's not. As is so often said in the fitness world, "No pain, no gain." You want to slim your waistline? Bigger muscles? You earn that progre...
