I was helping my friend move into their new house. Like many houses in Chicago, the wiring in this house was antique. The inspector had told him to call an electrician before he moved in, but he wasn’t sure it was needed. The plugs all worked, the lights came on, that’s enough, right? While we…
When you are responsible for sales, you have only one currency to spend — your time. So, it’s incredibly painful to spend time with a prospect and then find out that they don’t have the money, or they don’t see the value in your services. It’s especially painful when you’ve invested time with a prospect, created…
When I started my business, I knew that I had to get better at sales. I didn’t know the first thing about sales, and I knew I had to sell or starve! I dove into an expensive training course that taught me a specific consultative selling process. (It cost about as much as a year…
The pandemic has made it hard to know how to sell from week-to-week. Early on, the shock of the pandemic and the adjustment to work-from-home soaked up a lot of time and attention. For many, the idea of doing outreach in that climate felt tone-deaf. As the quarantine took hold, it was the fear about…
Over the last week, I’ve been fortunate to have phone calls with five new prospects — business owners who are committed to building their business even in the middle of everything that is 2020. I had five very different phone calls. One had seen the market for their $2.5M production business collapse, they have turned…
I used to read business books voraciously. Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, David Maister, Patrick Lencioni, I loved reading and learning from these business giants. They taught me so much! But, after a while, my desperation to voraciously consume business books started to wane. As I look back on it, I was so voracious because I…
When you read that subject line, you knew the decision I was talking about. It might be to fire someone, or to hire someone, to start doing something that scares you or to stop doing something that bores you. Whatever it is, make that decision today. You can’t afford to carry around that kind of…
”Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life forever.” ~Amy Poehler For the last week, we’ve been talking about risk. We talked about how difficult it will be to make a plan for the rest of 2020, about how we…
We talked previously about the massive uncertainties that we’re facing in 2020 — unprecedented unemployment globally, a genuine public health threat, a presidential election year, and social change that we haven’t seen in a generation. My recommendation was to narrow your focus, to pick one thing that you could do consistently and focus on doing…
We are in a world with massive uncertainty, and yet we need to run our business. How do we create a plan for the rest of 2020? The first thing I know is that it’s not going to be a plan like you made in January. We can’t just take last year, add 15%, target…