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...]
So you think your agency needs a salesperson…
As the business owner, the job of business development for your creative agency has been yours—from the beginning. But the thing is, you don’t like it. Maybe you don’t feel good at it, or successful as a salesperson, or maybe it just feels icky. But none of that matters now, because there’s a solution. You’re going to hire a salesperson, and that’s going to fix everything. It makes perfect sense. A skilled and experienced salesperson would (likely) know exactly what to do in order to increase sales. A skilled and experienced salesperson would handle the clients better, write better proposals, and close more of them…You’re asking yourself “Why didn’t I do this sooner?” before you even have … [Read more...]
Regular business success beats heroic efforts every time.
“Oooh, I LOVE that,” one of my clients said to me, “She worked half the night to finish that project. She’s a superhero! How do I find more people like her?” The only thing small business owners love more than telling stories about how hard they are working, is to tell stories about how hard their team is working. Get them started and you’ll hear about all-nighters, about 100 hour work weeks, and travel stories that go on and on—and they’ll be bursting with pride the whole time. I have a different reaction to those stories. Sure, it feels great when someone delivers 150% effort on your business’ behalf; but at what cost? When I hear about someone who worked all night, or who took a … [Read more...]
How to make a business decision
It could be said that business leaders have one job, and that’s to make decisions. The decisions we make affect people’s livelihoods, their careers – not just our employees – but our customers, our vendors, our community. I wonder how often any of us sit down and think about how we make business decisions – is our process any good? What could we do to improve it? It’s in that spirit that I offer you Brad’s guide to business decision making! (I’m sure books have been written about this, there’s lots to say, so consider this an incomplete summary…) To help us to walk through this I’m going to illustrate how to decide if we need to expand our account management team by hiring someone … [Read more...]
Looking back on 2017. Looking forward to 2018.
The turning of the year is, for many of us, a time of reflection. What happened in 2017? What was good? What was not so good? And what do we WANT to happen in 2018? It also just so happens to be the time when most business owners are planning and budgeting. It makes sense to take that exercise a little deeper and to really take stock of a company’s progress and decide on some direction for the following year. In that spirit of reflection, I’d like to call your attention to 4 trends I saw in 2017, and 5 that I’m tracking for 2018. 2017: AKA, Shooting the rapids. Although 2017 was a year with lots of political turmoil—both in the US and around the world—legislative uncertainty and … [Read more...]
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