What if you worked ALL DAY with clients who LOVE what you do, who are fully engaged in the process, and who want more from you in every meeting? What would that be like? There’s a secret formula to attracting those kinds of clients, Raise Your Prices! When you substantially raise your prices the only people…
Most people start their business with a broad target. We throw some things up against the wall to see what sticks. Our biggest fear is that no one will buy, and so we try to sell to everyone! By trying to be everything to everyone, we weren’t the perfect thing for any client! Plus, we…
Normally around this time of the year, it’s good to pause and review our progress. Take a minute to stop and review what’s been going well so far this year, what’s not, and plan how we can end the year strong. But this year… 2020… Well, it hasn’t gone according to plan, right? I don’t…
We talked previously about the massive uncertainties that we’re facing in 2020 — unprecedented unemployment globally, a genuine public health threat, a presidential election year, and social change that we haven’t seen in a generation. My recommendation was to narrow your focus, to pick one thing that you could do consistently and focus on doing…
We are in a world with massive uncertainty, and yet we need to run our business. How do we create a plan for the rest of 2020? The first thing I know is that it’s not going to be a plan like you made in January. We can’t just take last year, add 15%, target…
It’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who has been swimming naked. ~ Warren Buffett What’s going on right now is not a test, but it is showing you what’s not working. If you step back from the crisis a couple of paces and look at your business overall, the stress of…
Maximizing monthly recurring revenue (MMR) is a goal for most business owners. Knowing that we are going to have that retainer payment coming in each month makes it so much easier to plan our cash flow, our staffing and makes it easier to sleep at night. When I talk to agency owners they want as…
Getting retainer clients who pay you a fixed fee every month is one of the best ways to make your revenue more predictable. It’s incredible to know that you’ve got $45,000 from 5 clients coming in on the first of every month! But there’s a problem with fixed monthly fees — what are you delivering…
You know when you are in a “tribe” because you do the things that your tribe does, you wear the things that they wear, you sound like them, you look like them… Seth Godin, in one of his most popular blog posts, called it “People like us do things like this.” So when you think…
Just like children, businesses grow through predictable phases. We talked about start life as baby startups, that progress to raging growth companies in our last email. Today we reach adolescence, before settling into a more stable “adult” phase in our next email. Here’s my version of this story focused primarily on B2B service businesses. See if you…