About Brad Farris

So you know you need to get help to get this annoying project off your plate and finished, but you think it’s going to take too long to find a VA, or a student to do it for you. So you end up doing it yourself.  There are companies who have leaped into this gap and are trying to make it easier for you to get help, and for college students to get real-world experience.  What about a micro-internship If you have a short project like setting up a bunch of social media accounts for a new brand or building a media list that you can use to build momentum for your new product launch. Any research or execution task that’s got a simple, achievable outcome, you can hand it off to a college … [Read more...]

Earlier this week, we talked about how doing the wrong work can drain the life out of you, and how even stuff we’re good at might not be the thing that gives us life. If we keep working in these tedious roles, it drains our energy, and we risk getting burnt out.  But there’s a challenge there too — some of the tedious stuff is what clients pay me for! The easiest thing to sell is the thing we’ve already done a thousand times — and I’m the best person to deliver that. So… I’m going to guess that when you started your business, one of your dreams was to walk away from the tedious work that didn’t satisfy you, right? But now you are justifying that  you need to do that work “because … [Read more...]

With Thanksgiving behind us, there’s just one long sprint to the end of the year.  We’ve got 4 weeks left to accomplish our annual goals, while we do all the holiday shopping, gift-giving, party-going, and family event preparation. It’s the “happiest time of the year,” right? It’s these kind of crunch times when I find myself wondering, can I keep going like this? (Then I get kind of grouchy and my family starts calling me a scrooge.) If you are like most business owners you don’t have a clean job description — your job is to do “all the things” that need to be done to keep the business going. This job doesn’t have a defined beginning and end, it just seems like we’re always in the … [Read more...]

Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance." ~ Eckhart Tolle In the US, we celebrate Thanksgiving this week. It's a tradition that dates back to the Civil War when despite the hardship and loss, Abraham Lincoln felt the need to pause and recognize the tremendous blessings that we had as a nation. If you've been with me for the whole of 2019 this is the 140th email I've sent to you -- thanks for continuing to read as I continue to learn how to publish in this way! I'm especially grateful for all of you who replied, who got on the phone with me, or who connected with me on LinkedIn. The interaction with you all is what keeps me going on … [Read more...]

Whenever I work with a team on strategic planning eventually someone says,  “Yeah, well, this is all well and good, but halfway through the year we’ll have forgotten all of this and be working on like a million OTHER things…” The sad part is, they aren’t wrong.  They’ve likely seen that pattern played out a bunch of times with different teams over the years. We make New Year's resolutions, and we abandon them by the end of February. We create project plans with tremendous enthusiasm only to find them on our computer a year later… But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are four ways to keep your strategic decisions alive in your company all year long. #1: Make someone … [Read more...]

On Saturday, I wrote about my client who filled his calendar all day, every day with meetings. Not meetings in which he got to do the thing he loves — meetings to cover administriva, operations meetings, places where he had to make decisions about things that he wasn’t an expert in.  He had resolved many times to get himself out of those meetings, to build some margin into his calendar, but that intention had never resulted in change. He had to say “No” to things he didn’t want to do, things that consumed his time and energy; in order to make room for the creativity, the thinking and the action that enabled him to do his very best work.  If you find yourself in this dilemma, here are … [Read more...]

His business had grown -- it was bigger now than he ever thought it would get to be. He's making good money, driving a nice car, has a big office, a place out by the lake...things are good. Except, he's tired, exhausted really. He's tried changing up his workout; he tried taking a big long vacation; nothing seems to work. It's not like there's something else he'd rather be doing, but this just isn't turning his crank anymore. He calls me to talk about selling his business, but I can tell he doesn't really want to sell. I glance over at his computer and look at his calendar -- it's a solid block of meetings. All day, every day, he's booked in meetings! What do you love to do? I … [Read more...]