You can learn a lot about your business through market research and customer feedback. But if you're building a brand for the long term, there's a deeper story that isn't so easily quantified. It's the more personal story you're telling yourself and then to your customers that keeps people coming back. And after t...
Being a business owner means more than owning the company. You're also a business leader - whether you have a 50-person team, or you're a solopreneur. Right now, by design or by accident, you're setting the direction and tone of everything your company does. It takes a crisis for most business owners to start acti...
In this podcast, we dispel the myth that market research has to be complicated and expensive.
Shouldn't business coaches have a great business of their own? How much can they really help you if they're teaching but not doing? And by doing, I mean working on their business the way they say you should be working on yours.
Time management is painful: real leaders do it anyway. We all want to feel good, and not feel bad. So we prefer that change be comfortable. Sometimes it is. Most of the time it's not. As is so often said in the fitness world, "No pain, no gain." You want to slim your waistline? Bigger muscles? You earn that progre...
Little gets our entrepreneurial spirits soaring like the vision of ourselves as the CEO of a successful startup. Whether you’re brand new to business or a serial entrepreneur, the allure of starting out from nothing and then building a world-class business is a thrilling concept. But we can’t ignore the risks. Sta...
The original EMyth call to action was simple and powerful: to grow your business you have to free yourself from the technical work so you have room to lead. If you’re an architect trying to grow your firm, you won’t get there spending all day at the drafting table. But that kind of obvious technical work is just t...
Passion and drive go a long way. There were 5,000 little things you did to survive in the face of long odds of small business success - the late nights, juggling expenses, praying for new customers. You leaned on that passion and drive to get through - and it worked.
You need your managers doing real managerial work, and real managerial work has nothing to do with being a supervisor. Real management is about designing and building systems, and mentoring people - which is a very different thing than supervising them.
The results are in - and the 2013 State of The Business Owner (SOBO) Report is live. We wanted to share one of the report's key findings. Here's a preview of the "The Ownership Stack" - a powerful set of best practices successful business owners are using to grow their business in today's rapidly changing economy....
Second Annual State of the Business Owner Report reveals that the top 3 factors that motivate entrepreneurs to start their business are: freedom passion independence For today’s entrepreneurs, starting a business is not all about the money. According to the 2013 State Of The Business Owner (SOBO) Report, announced...
It takes a while for obsolete ideas to die off. There's one that I'm surprised to see is still very much in circulation. It's a management philosophy that's responsible for most of the dysfunction that exists in the business world. It goes like this:
As was famously said, you can't solve a problem at the level of the thinking that created it. Whether you're struggling with slow sales, low morale, or bleeding cash in your operations, the current issue has roots that go far deeper than the surface issue - the "symptom."
It might sound strange, but one of our goals in transforming our company was to make our technology department obsolete.
Most business leaders and professionals lead with their head. It mostly works, and nobody will criticize you for it (usually because that’s the way they do it). But you’re paying a huge price every day in the form of stress, stagnation and self-doubt, in ways you might not realize. Leading by heart is a whole othe...
Spending time (you don’t have) and money (you need for other things) on marketing before you’re ready is the Achilles’ heel of many entrepreneurs. That’s part of the reason why it’s the last point of emphasis in what we call the Seven Dynamics. Here’s what you must do first:
Work-life balance is impossible. In fact, it might be the most insidious and counterproductive idea in the business conversation today. Here’s why: