What do oyster farming, planning and your business have in common? If you work in the oyster farming business, then one thing is certain: everything can—and will—go wrong in your business. Wind, rain, tidal swells, oil spills and sea sickness to name a few. Rest assured, there will be an obstacle in your way.
Trendspotting is a term most commonly used in fashion circles. Top designers will spend thousands of dollars to send their curators all over the world to… spot trends. We’ve notoriously been told that the fashion industry is capable of predicting what colors we will want to wear before we even know we want to wear...
Do you ever ask an employee for something you requested several days earlier and get a puzzled look? Or, get the response: “I didn’t know you wanted it today.” Or, even more baffling the employee tells you: “I don’t know how to do that.” These are the kinds of answers that cause many owners to hesitate when delega...
Numbers—drilling down into a complex spreadsheet of financial data—can be unsettling. Even to those who are accustomed to reviewing their own financials and metrics on a regular basis, it’s entirely possible to feel degrees of panic when faced with looking at the numbers. Why? Because there’s no hiding from the tr...
So you’ve found yourself doing a better job of hiring and retaining the right employees. The last key point in my blog post, “Hiring and Keeping Rockstar Employees,” referenced documenting the system. You’ve spent a lot of time understanding and strategizing, and it would be a shame if you didn’t take it a step fu...
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’...
Would you apply for a job at your business? Think about it for a moment. With where you are in your life—with your unique talents and dreams—is it the kind of place that would support you in getting closer to the life you want? Do you think you have any employees who aren’t evaluating their jobs, right this very m...
There’s no substitute for being in the same place as your employees. And that’s a good thing. Part of the joy of going to work is that you get to spend your day with people you respect, and we hope, enjoy being around. And while there are some good reasons to have people on your team who work remotely, you have to...
It's probably easier to see now, but you didn't start your business just to make money. You did it to feel something - independence, a kind of freedom and control over your life, to be able to do it your way. And you "re-earn" that freedom with every headache and heartache that comes with being a business owner. B...
As a business owner, do you also think of yourself as a coach? Embracing this part of your role - to help your people grow while your company does - is more important than ever before. Because even if they don't always say so, everyone on your team wants the same thing: to feel that their work mattered today, to y...
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...
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...
You can learn a lot about your business through market research and customer feedback. But if you're building a brand for the long term, there's a deeper story that isn't so easily quantified. It's the more personal story you're telling yourself and then to your customers that keeps people coming back. And after t...
Most businesses hire out of short term desperation, and pay a long term price. How much time went into your last bad hiring decision - compared to how much energy you've spent dealing with it.
You need your managers doing real managerial work, and real managerial work has nothing to do with being a supervisor. Real management is about designing and building systems, and mentoring people - which is a very different thing than supervising them.
It takes a while for obsolete ideas to die off. There's one that I'm surprised to see is still very much in circulation. It's a management philosophy that's responsible for most of the dysfunction that exists in the business world. It goes like this:
A See-Through Strategy The business world is very confused about something incredibly simple. Caring. Have you noticed how much “caring” everybody is doing these days?