There’s been this series of intersecting ideas coming at me lately centered around business strategy and the planning time-horizon. Recently, Evernote announced that their latest round of funding was not an exit strategy for its founders but a foundation for building a “100 year company” I read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh that describes how Zappos was built and […]
Archive | Business
Small Business is like a Viking Ship
Think about your small-medium business as a viking ship. These amazing crafts were fast, nimble and could travel great distances to deliver the viking “brand”. They were capable in deep water but were particularly effective in shallow water – places larger ships could not venture (think lean economic times and niche). The leader (CEO/MD) would […]
Google+ should be targeting LinkedIn not Facebook
This week, Google launched its latest social media initiative – Google+. If you wanted to describe it to someone, you would say – “it’s like Facebook, but from Google”. And that it seems is what the vast majority of blogs, tweets, articles and other reviews have been saying. Everyone is comparing Google+ to the power […]
Represent!
Once upon a time, not so long ago.. you were able to keep your personal life and your work life completely separate. You could effectively be two different people or at least have two completely different personalities and no one would ever know. And then came social networking sites such as Facebook. In a book called The Facebook Effect, Mark […]
Customer or Client?
I’ve been involved in a few discussions recently on whether we have customers or clients. For some, this may be a mere matter of semantics – saying that the terms are interchangeable. But I think a business needs to be consistent in their reference and we haven’t been. Customer vs Client – what is the […]
The problem with recruitment agents
First, let me say that I am a frequent consumer of services from recruitment agencies. I run a fast growing business and without them, my job would be made far more difficult. I love them… but I hate them. Other than getting five cold calls per day from different recruiters – which can be annoying, […]
Busy Work
I was standing in line at the bank the other day with about eight other people. There was one teller, but I could see four other people sitting at “closed” windows looking very busy. Eight customers in the queue – one teller. Four other bank employees with their heads down trying not to make eye […]
Servant Leadership
I came across an article in Inc. Magazine last month on Servant Leadership that really hit the mark for me. The basic premise is summed up by a quote from Kent Keith, CEO of Greenleaf Center of Servant Leadership: “I think the simplest way to explain it would be to say that servant leaders focus […]
B2B Marketing and Sales are not Sequential Activitities
For a large part of my professional career, I considered marketing and sales to be interrelated but sequential elements of any business. Marketing generates leads. These leads are recorded and delivered to sales. Marketing goes back to generating more leads. Sales converts leads into orders/contracts. Complains about lack of leads. Rinse. Repeat. This model probably […]
The Formula for Trust
Trust is an essential part of most healthy relationships – personal and professional. Trust gives faith – and if you are in the intangible services market, then there is often a leap in faith when clients hire you. I recently came across an article on the principles of Trust that had an equation for building […]