Driving to work, you reflect on your business – and it makes you smile. “I’m working with a terrific team that delivers excellent work and the clients are asking for more. It feels so good to have a strong team behind me,” you’re thinking. “When I don’t have to fight fires all the time, I…
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. …
So a few weeks ago I talked about three bad ways to measure your daily progress (that we all fall for) and as I was looking for some better ways to track progress I came across this post by @macsparky about a method he’s been using, it’s simple, effective and I kind of like it…
I was sitting in a cafe last week when I noticed Every Breath You Take come on the background music. I’m not a big Sting fan, but it got me thinking. Sting wrote this song in 1982, and he’s still making money on it today! From Wikipedia: The song is considered to be both the…
Bosses don’t get the same feedback as other people because it’s costly for people to call you out. When you embarrass someone, or get angry for no reason, or say something inappropriate, there may be an awkward silence, but there’s rarely someone getting up in your grill about it. So if you’ve been a “boss”…
A week or so ago, I wrote about The vulnerability of the business owner, and that post generated a lot of responses! There are a couple that I’d like to lean into over the next few emails. One business owner replied to that email by saying: Thank you for acknowledging that feeling vulnerable is inherent…
One of the challenges of owning your own business is that you are both the CEO, responsible for the day-to-day decisions and direction of the company AND you are also the principal investor responsible for the long-term health of the business and interested in improving the equity value of the firm. To use a sports…
If I stop at the end of a busy day and think, “Did I do a good job today?” I tend to think about 3 things — did I crush my to-do list? Did I win the email battle? And, did I put money in the bank? But if I stop to think about it,…
Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. ~Brene Brown Business owners are often indistinguishable from their businesses. Our self-worth and our identity are all tied up in our business performance. When the business performs well, we’re champions; when it doesn’t, we can feel worthless. Each of our decisions, good, or bad, nudge our business…
Last week I was talking to two different business owners, both were in similar circumstances, but they told me very different stories. Business Owner 1 This business owner runs a marketing firm that focuses on urban real estate companies. They had some terrible years in 2008 – 2012 — but the owner told a very…