I have a friend who owns a farm. It’s a small farm, but still; he’s got chickens, sheep, goats, pigs, cows, and produce in the summer. I went up to visit him for a weekend and we spent the better part of the weekend building a chicken coop. Just the two of us, with some…
On most Saturday mornings I get up early. My school aged son watches cartoons for a while and I amble into the kitchen to start my batch of sourdough bread. I usually brew up a cup of tea and then start mixing the bread. It takes about 3 hours of on and off kneading and…
One of the things I say to new advisors who join our team is that clients always want us to fix “the team”. Clients tell us, “They [meaning their team members] have terrible attention to detail, they never follow through, they are always missing deadlines…” (the list goes on and on). Of course they are…
“How do you know you are doing a good job?” Early in an engagement with a new client I usually go around and ask this question to each of the management employees in the company. It’s a simple question, but having employees who are clear about the answer is key to driving employee engagement and…
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. ~Abraham Lincoln. It’s likely that every person reading this email has some kind of system for managing their “to-do” list. On my computer I can identify at least 4 pieces of…
When a business can successfully and reliably generate leads then it makes the whole business run better. So how do we generate leads? The conventional wisdom today is to build a “lead magnet” on your website and then do a ton of outreach, advertising, and promotion to drive traffic to that “lead magnet” to build…
When we are looking to grow our business there are a lot of avenues we can pursue; better proposals, better presentations, sharpening our pricing, networking, advertising… But there’s only one thing that’s likely to consistently grow your business, and that’s more leads. The more people you talk to who are actually interested in buying your…
Right now your business depends on you. In order for your business to remain healthy you need to be healthy. Yes, the goal is to have a day when that’s not true, when you can spend a month in the Bahamas and no one misses you, but today is not that day. You are still…
Many business owners that I know will create job descriptions for their team members, but how many of us have a job description for our own job? We create job descriptions to set expectations with our team members. We want them to know what we expect them to do. Business owners need this too! I…
As a business owner, we all have more than one job (many of us carry 4 or 5); but two of those jobs are the same for every business owner. The first is being a great leader in your business. Whether you are the CEO/President, or a partner who shares the leadership, one of your…