How To Raise Prices Without Losing Clients in your Small Business
No matter how great the work is, and how much fun you are having – nothing can thwart a business owner’s enthusiasm like being broke. It’s no fun lying to your vendors about when you can pay them. It’s no fun worrying all night about covering payroll. When you work night and day, night and day, only to realize that the money that just came in the door is about to go right out ... you start to think, “Take this job and shove it!” Too bad there’s no boss to say that to! So what’s the answer? Well, most of the business owners I meet that are in this situation think they need MORE business, “If I just had five more clients...” If you had five more clients you’d be working 20 hours a day and … [Read more...]
7 signs that you may be headed for business owner burnout
The stereotype of a business owner is the ever optimistic ball of energy who’s working hard, playing hard and enjoying life; and I meet a fair number of business owners who fit that stereotype. Over the last couple of years though I’ve noticed that a growing number of the folks I’m meeting fit in a different category. They are still optimistic and full of ideas, but their energy is more muted, sometimes edgy. As I talk to them I notice that they’ve been fighting and clawing to get their business going for a number of years, and though they don’t really think about it—they’re tired—maybe even exhausted. On the outside they’ve still got the positive, optimistic vibe going, but on the inside … [Read more...]
Learning from Failure: Things don’t always work out perfectly…
“We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.” ~ Samuel Smiles I was listening to Alex Blumberg interview Nina Jacobson on the podcast WithoutFail when she mentioned the idea of a failure resume. She said she was inspired by a professor who found that “failures sort of define who you are and what you’ve learned and how you’ve really sort of been impacted in many respects more than your successes do. And that owning those failures and embracing them is sort of a critical component to successful people.” That professor is Tina Seelig and she’s the ED … [Read more...]
More Ideas Than Time
I have more ideas than time! My team is so frustrated. We are loaded with good ideas—ideas that will make us money! But we can't even get the work done to execute on the services we already have going! When my team sees me roll in with another "great idea" their eyes shoot daggers at me. How do I decide what we should execute on, and what we should delay? Should we just work harder? What do I do with these ideas we can't get to? When a business is just starting out, the most important question that a business owner is asking (and they ask it a lot) is "Will this thing GO? Can we survive?". When you're facing survival, trying everything is a rational strategy. You don't really know … [Read more...]
How Great CEOs Spend Their Time
Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. ~Eleanor Roosevelt One of the best things about being a business owner is FREEDOM. In any given moment, I’m the only one that I have to answer to. My time is my own and I use it as I like. One of the worst things about being a business owner is FREEDOM. There is no one to tell me what to do! I am 100% responsible for how I use my time! (And I’m frequently disappointed in myself…) This paradox is like a tiger stalking around the back of my brain. It keeps me up at night. Am I doing a good job? How would I know…? So when I saw that Michael Porter published an extensive study called The Leader’s … [Read more...]
Why You Will Hire The Wrong Person
One article consistently stood at the top of the list of “Most Read Articles” on the New York Times website in 2017: Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton. In it, de Botton argues that we are looking for an ideal partner (without flaw or conflict), while ignoring the fact that, as human beings, we all are deeply flawed and often a little bit crazy. In summary he says, “Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.” To me this sounds like the way most of us make hiring … [Read more...]
Too Many Ideas, Not Enough Time
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. ~ John Steinbeck Entrepreneurs are starters; we love to begin something new! We also see opportunities that others don’t see. So as we live our lives we are always coming up with new ways of doing things, new ideas that need to be pursued, new opportunities. How many times have you come back to your office, all excited by a new idea; you share it with your team and they grimace. They aren’t excited, to them it looks like work – and besides – what happened to the last 40 great ideas you came running in the office with? Ouch! That stings. Opportunity is missed by most people because … [Read more...]
A Recipe for Recruiting and Managing Creative People
Recruiting great creative talent is hard. The best, most talented creatives are always in demand and have their choice of where to go work. Good creatives have high standards! They aren’t going to work just anywhere. If you need top creative talent you need to build a culture that allows them to do great work. I’ve seen a few strategies that do just that. Preparation Start by bringing in fresh client challenges. These are challenges that don’t have easy, “textbook” solutions and will require the best out of your current team in order to succeed. Make sure that these clients really need great solutions—that they won’t settle for “pretty good” —because the challenges that they face are … [Read more...]
Don’t just think about it—do something!
“Change leads to insight more than insight leads to change” ~Milton H. Erickson Sometimes you just have to give things a try. I’ve spent many hours with clients trying to help them to understand a new or different concept that I’m confident will help their business. I want clients to “understand” the concept. Understanding a new concept helps them to accept it; and can also give them the resilience to persist even if the early results aren’t what they expect. I’m happy to put in that time. But I’ve been doing some reflecting on when I’ve made the biggest changes in my life; and they mostly weren’t driven by great insights, or sudden new awareness or information. The greatest changes … [Read more...]
PROPOSALS…HUNH! YEAH! What are they good for?
(ACTUALLY? Not a whole lot.) I work with a lot of service firm owners and there’s one thing they all hate, and that’s writing proposals. They love meeting with prospects, identifying the problems the prospects are having, and talking about how they can help. But then they get back to their office and the work of actually writing the proposal is a grind. And it’s easy to see why when you look at the proposals themselves; they are (truly) works of ART! My clients will craft unique descriptions of the problem, then outline (step-by-painful-step) how their unique process™ will produce the solution their prospect is looking for. Then they add to that team bios, case studies, and all kinds of … [Read more...]
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