Over the last couple of posts, we’ve been talking about how important it is to let go of what you did as an individual contributor and embrace your role as the leader of a growing firm. But being an individual contributor was easy. I knew how to do that! I was clear when I had…
On Saturday we talked about how your job isn’t doing the thing. (The thing might be designing, writing, creating campaigns, storytelling, whatever it was that you were good at that you sold to clients to get the agency started!) Your job is to build the system. Your job is to create the container, the way…
Jerry Colonna coaches venture-backed CEOs, and he’s coached a boatload of them! He’s worked with the CEOs of Etsy, Foursquare, Intuit, and Soundcloud to name a few. But not just when they are big and famous; he works with many folks who are in their startup phase. On a recent podcast, he said of the…
One of the key roles of a successful agency owner is to build a network outside of your agency. You are your agency’s eyes and ears. You are scanning the horizon to find the “next thing” that clients are going to need, the problems that they are going to run into so that you can…
When I was in the busiest time of my life; I was getting my business going, I was raising some teenagers, I was struggling with figuring out how to get everything done and do this “life thing” in a way that felt at all successful. In the middle of that time, I asked an older…
When you look at this image, what do you see? Do you see the “gap”? The amount that the performance is short of the goal. Or do you see the 50% improvement that has been made to close the gap? High-performing people are constantly setting goals and striving to meet those goals. Once we meet…
Earlier this month, I wrote a post about how you could Marie Kondo your to-do list. Later that day, I met with a client of mine, and he was skeptical. “I can’t knock things off my to-do list just because I don’t want to do them. I have clients that need me to get stuff…
Imagine you are driving through a snowstorm at night. The snow is swirling in your headlights, the lines on the road are obscured, the road is slippery. How do you respond? Do you speed up and try to get through the snow quickly so that you can get to your destination before it gets worse?…
After Tuesday’s message, you’ve narrowed down your expectations for 2022 to just the most critical initiatives, things that have to be accomplished. Good work! Now let’s make sure that they happen. How have you done in past years? Looking back over past years, what percentage of your annual goals got accomplished? Not how many did you…
None of us got to the point where we were working non-stop because we thought it was a good idea! We did it because there’s so much work that needs to be done! Or so I thought. As I’ve been learning to slow down, I’ve discovered something unexpected. Most of the work I thought was…