It’s that time of year when the days are short, our houses are full, and our work is done (or as done as it’s going to get). I’m going to take some time off so you won’t be hearing from me again until 1/7.  It’s my sincere hope that you are also taking some time off, enjoying time with your family and friends and resting in the blessings of a year’s hard work. God bless! See you in 2020. … [Read more...]

Tuesday I wrote to you about “Joshua,” a young employee who had taken the initiative to make himself several different roles within my client’s company. He was filling holes that he saw in what needed to be done, sometimes dropping some balls in the process. My client was frustrated with his performance. I used Joshua’s example to ask you if you were accommodating someone who had been “loyal and hardworking,” but may not deliver the performance your growing company needs.  I got a lot of feedback on this message, both in my inbox and on LinkedIn, where I also posted a similar message. I got everything from, “I’m a fan of loyalty if you can find a fit, but it’s a business, not a charity. … [Read more...]

“He’s been with us from the beginning. I think he was the fourth employee hired in the company!” This is how the conversation started with one of my clients who was telling me about his “problem employee.” “Things started great.” Joshua came to them through a friend, and when they met him, they could see the “fit.” He was young, energetic, eager to learn, and he had worked in small companies before. They hired him on the spot and got him started as a project manager.  He was a decent project manager, but then he volunteered to take help out with business development. As he ramped up his networking and outreach, things started to fall through the cracks on his projects, so they moved … [Read more...]

First, take a minute to imagine a future where your dreams have come true.  Imagine that your team is regularly generating new work for your firm. Not just any work, but good, referencable work, that’s making a huge difference.  As a result, your company has grown! How big? You decide. Is it 10, 20, 50, 100 employees?  As a result, your income has grown too. What kind of money are you aspiring to make? Really get a picture in your mind of what that company looks like. Where are your offices? What’s your team? Got it? Now… What’s your job in that company? Are you meeting with clients? Primarily selling? What time are you spending leading your team, planning for the future, … [Read more...]

So you know you need to get help to get this annoying project off your plate and finished, but you think it’s going to take too long to find a VA, or a student to do it for you. So you end up doing it yourself.  There are companies who have leaped into this gap and are trying to make it easier for you to get help, and for college students to get real-world experience.  What about a micro-internship If you have a short project like setting up a bunch of social media accounts for a new brand or building a media list that you can use to build momentum for your new product launch. Any research or execution task that’s got a simple, achievable outcome, you can hand it off to a college … [Read more...]

Earlier this week, we talked about how doing the wrong work can drain the life out of you, and how even stuff we’re good at might not be the thing that gives us life. If we keep working in these tedious roles, it drains our energy, and we risk getting burnt out.  But there’s a challenge there too — some of the tedious stuff is what clients pay me for! The easiest thing to sell is the thing we’ve already done a thousand times — and I’m the best person to deliver that. So… I’m going to guess that when you started your business, one of your dreams was to walk away from the tedious work that didn’t satisfy you, right? But now you are justifying that  you need to do that work “because … [Read more...]

With Thanksgiving behind us, there’s just one long sprint to the end of the year.  We’ve got 4 weeks left to accomplish our annual goals, while we do all the holiday shopping, gift-giving, party-going, and family event preparation. It’s the “happiest time of the year,” right? It’s these kind of crunch times when I find myself wondering, can I keep going like this? (Then I get kind of grouchy and my family starts calling me a scrooge.) If you are like most business owners you don’t have a clean job description — your job is to do “all the things” that need to be done to keep the business going. This job doesn’t have a defined beginning and end, it just seems like we’re always in the … [Read more...]

Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance." ~ Eckhart Tolle In the US, we celebrate Thanksgiving this week. It's a tradition that dates back to the Civil War when despite the hardship and loss, Abraham Lincoln felt the need to pause and recognize the tremendous blessings that we had as a nation. If you've been with me for the whole of 2019 this is the 140th email I've sent to you -- thanks for continuing to read as I continue to learn how to publish in this way! I'm especially grateful for all of you who replied, who got on the phone with me, or who connected with me on LinkedIn. The interaction with you all is what keeps me going on … [Read more...]