With cities starting to re-open after the COVID pause business owners are asking the question, should I re-open my office? If you are thinking about re-opening your office, you’d better have a good reason! Your company has spent the last two months working at home, and there’s a number of them who are liking it. So if you’re bringing them back, you need to be able to communicate some good reasons to do it. So putting aside the question of how you re-open your office safely (that’s a topic for another day), let’s look at why you might want to get your office open.  There are things we can do in the office that we can’t do from home There are some businesses for whom this decision is a … [Read more...]

This week my wife assigned her nieces and nephews some homework.  She asked them to write two letters to the Coronavirus. In one, she wanted them to start, “I hate you coronavirus…” and then write down all the crummy things that happened since the shutdown.  In the second letter, she asked them to start with, “Coronavirus, I’m so thankful for…” and write down all the good things that happened during the quarantine.  I was curious about that second letter! We’ve all got a lot of complaints about the Coronavirus shutdown, but what could be good about it? We’ve made a LOT of changes Our organizations have gone through unprecedented transformation in the last two months! Some have … [Read more...]

“Hey boss, could I ask you something? You know we just had a baby last year, and we bought a new house too. I’m just wondering, how’s the company doing?” It’s reasonable for your team to be asking you questions like this right now. Truthfully, if they aren’t asking you, it’s because they are too scared!  Everyone feels the uncertainty and is carrying a high level of anxiety and dread around all the time.  Breaking news: Fear and dread are not good for employee engagement or effective team dynamics.  When people are afraid, they tend to center their thoughts on themselves, “How can I get what I need? How do I protect myself and my family?” They tend to take fewer risks. “Let’s just … [Read more...]

When the quarantine first started, one of the things I saw was businesses that had primarily sold through networking, and F2F interaction had their top of funnel activity cut off. In quarantine we have; No networking No conferences No meetups No leads! No business can survive for long without regularly putting leads into the top of the funnel — in fact — I believe that adding folks to the top of your funnel is the #1 indicator of future sales.  So I pulled together a group of business owners who had primarily sold face-to-face — we met for 1 hour a week, and in the last seven weeks, together we worked through a complete process for how to prospect online without … [Read more...]

It’s 3 AM; you’re wide awake, unable to go back to sleep. What’s on your mind? When I’m awake at 3 AM unable to go back to sleep, my fears are running away with me. I’ve done something terribly wrong, I’ve miscalculated my expenses, my clients are never going to pay me again, I’m defaulting on my mortgage, my family is living under a bridge somewhere — why did I ever start this business! Do you ever have thoughts like those? What’s your version of that? Instead of fighting those fears, encourage them. I know it sounds crazy, but I’m learning to make friends with my fears instead of fighting with them. I’ll give you an example. It’s 3 AM, I’m wide awake, and I’m afraid that I made … [Read more...]

When you own a business you get to be the top dog, things run “your way,” and you get to decide what you want to do, when you want to work, everything about your business is yours to decide. It also means that when things go wrong, it’s your fault. When your team members drop the ball and don’t deliver assignments on time, that’s your fault. When your clients fire you out of the blue, leaving your team short of work and your bank low on cash, it’s your fault. When the bank deducts a check from your account twice, which means your payroll doesn’t go through and your staff is pissed, it’s your fault. You get the idea. How can it be my fault when the bank screws up, or the … [Read more...]

When I as in Jr High, I started buying bikes at garage sales.  I had a paper route, so I had a little money, but not too much. So most of the bikes I bought were non-functional.  I started cannibalizing parts from one bike to make another bike work. I could generally make one “franken-bike” from two or three garage sale bikes and sell it for a modest profit.  But what I loved was finding a way to make something work out of different parts. How could I MacGyver together stuff that wasn’t supposed to work? Can you do that professionally? That’s how I ended up going to school to learn engineering — the process of taking a bunch of stuff and making something useful! After eight or … [Read more...]

There’s a lot of stress and fear right now. I feel the anxiety in every call! Where have all the clients gone? How long will this last like this? What’s next? No matter how successful your business was eight weeks ago, you’re going to have to make changes this year. You can do it out of fear and desperation, or out of opportunity and gratefulness. Instead of letting fear tell us we “have to” change, let’s come out the other side with a business that we like! A company that allows us to do the things we’re best at. Let’s leave behind the parts that we thought that we “had to do” or that we “should do” — we all know now — life’s too short for shoulds and have-tos. What would you … [Read more...]