Running a business is so rewarding, but it can also be tremendously stressful and lonely. Business owners get so caught up in the day-to-day of the business that we struggle to see the big picture. We’re not sure why sales have stagnated, why we can’t seem to take a vacation, why we’re still second-guessing every…
I recently surveyed over 100 business owners about how their business and job changes as they gain experience and their business grows. The full report is going to take me a while to collate and write, but the answers to one question stuck out at me. When asked, “What would you consider to be your…
A few weeks ago, I had a day packed with good things! That afternoon I was meeting with a new coach, I had a client meeting, and I knew she had experienced some breakthroughs in her business, I couldn’t wait to hear. But my morning meetings had run over, and I just had a few…
There’s been insane growth in the use of Slack as an internal messaging platform to reduce the volume of internal emails and from what I’ve seen from companies who adopt it, it has passionate fans! Those fans have driven incredible growth in their user base. What’s interesting to me is how much Slack has grown…
In our last conversation, we talked about choosing an industry, or vertical specialization, as a way to find your “people like us,” but what if there’s not one industry that fits your business? One of my clients, Diane Yetter of Yetter Tax, helps people with their most difficult sales tax problems. Though we think of sales…
In our last conversation, we talked about how “people like us, do things like this.” How identifying your tribe, and then acting in ways that show you are a part of that tribe, can significantly accelerate the growth of your business. Which begs the question: who are your people like us, and how do you…
You know when you are in a “tribe” because you do the things that your tribe does, you wear the things that they wear, you sound like them, you look like them… Seth Godin, in one of his most popular blog posts, called it “People like us do things like this.” So when you think…
In our house, there’s only one show that the whole family watches religiously the moment it’s available and that’s Snake City. Snake City is a show that follows a South African snake catcher (Simon Keys) and his assistant/girlfriend (Siouxsie Gillett) as they drive around Durban catching poisonous snakes. (Durban is loaded with venomous snakes!) Simon…
In our last conversation, we talked about The U-Curve, the predictable path that business profits take as your business grows from “just you” to “you and your team.” The most important feature of the U-Curve is the flat bottom. That’s the zone where profits are slim, growth is hard, and a lot of entrepreneurs stall…
Remember that first time you got paid by a client? You stepped out on your own, got some work, delivered on it, and got paid. I know for me it felt like magic. People were just giving me money! As my business grew I started adding some expenses, I built a website, I added a…