How do you review a year like 2020? In a normal year, November is when I pull out my goals for the year and see how we’ve done. Maybe there are one or two areas where I can buckle down the last 6 weeks of the year and make up the gap between my January…
Confucius said: We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one. I talked with an agency owner this month. He was earnest about growing his business. “I’m just going to burn hard on my business for like 10 years, then sell it and enjoy life,” he told me. I…
When someone says, “She’s a great leader,” here’s what they really mean: She knows where her organization is going and communicates that relentlessly. She knows how to orient team members to success and hold them accountable. She communicates tasks specifically, with timelines and measurements. She roots for her team to succeed; she believes that they…
For me, it started slowly. In the beginning, I reserved Fridays: no client meetings, no commitments. Friday became the day I worked on my business. I was panicked! What would clients say if I told them I couldn’t meet on Friday? No one even noticed. So then I got excited, what if I reserved Mondays…
I’ve worked with clients who have kept their businesses growing through some pretty dire circumstances. I’ve seen folks grow through major recessions. One of my clients famously told me that she was “not participating in the recession.” And she didn’t! I’ve worked with clients who have lost key staff members, even seen whole departments quit,…
You have one job to do; you need to keep your business moving forward no matter what is happening in the larger world. But that “larger world” isn’t making it easy! We’ve got a pandemic with an ever-shifting public health response. What support will we get from the government? Who is this going to impact…
Yes, I love it when I can plan my budget for the year and then month-by-month tick off achievement after achievement. That feels great; it builds my confidence and makes me feel so smart! But I don’t learn much during those times. When everything is going great, I tend to get a little cocky and…
When things are shifting and uncertain, it’s tempting to try to think our way out of the uncertainty. If I can get more information; if I can talk to more people, or work out a more through plan… That’s not how uncertainty works. In fact, that’s how our anxious brain works. Our anxious mind runs…
I sat down today to write about uncertainty, but I’m not making much progress. Why? Well, I’m not sure what to say . On the one hand, we’ve been living with a lot of uncertainty all year. Uncertainty about our health and the health of those we care about. Uncertainty about our businesses, what’s changing…
Let’s say we were sitting in your strategic planning meeting this time last year, and we were planning out your strategy for 2020. Now imagine that I stood up in that meeting and said, 2020 is going to be a unique year! There will be a global crisis so severe that the government is going…