We all want to market our brand. To get it out there. To make ourselves known to our potential customers. But what is marketing, anyway? Is it simply shouting from the rooftops, or it there more to it? Seth Godin, in a recent blog post, succinctly defined what marketing is: Marketing involves making a promise and keeping it. Marketers understand …

All too often our businesses (and our lives in general) are controlled by the next emergency. We jump from crisis to crisis, doing our best to manage an unmanageable sequence of events. We spend all our waking moments putting out fires, and this causes us to ignore the source of our troubles, leading to even more fires waiting for us. …

Lots of people like to feel involved; like they contributed something; like they played a part (even if it’s a small part) in the finished product. That’s why lots of things that we buy have a few tiny steps that need to be finished (by us) before we can start using our new product. The manufacturer could have easily completed …

Can you remember back when you were just starting? Think about all the things you didn’t know about your job. We’ve learned so much since then, by just being aware of what it is we’re doing. It’s tempting to forget that we had to learn all that stuff the hard way, and simply believe that we’ve always known everything about …

Luck plays a bigger role in our success than we’d like to believe. When I started in the home inspection industry, I got in when things were just starting to blow up. That was luck. When I was marketing in that real estate office, an agent just got a purchase agreement signed and her normal home inspector was on vacation …

We (should) all know what an elevator pitch is: a quick description of what we offer, that can be delivered to someone in the time it takes us to ride an elevator to our destinations. It’s never great to try to boil down someone’s work into a quick quip or meme. People, and their passions, are usually much more involved …

It used to be expensive to have an email marketing campaign for your business. It used to be a hassle to post regularly to social media channels to keep your business top of mind. It used to be a frustrating enterprise to put out online content. It used to cost an arm and a leg to produce a promotional video …

Lots of people start their own business in order to get away from having a boss, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even if you’re working by yourself, with no other employees in the picture, there’s still a boss involved. It’s you. We’re the person that we’ve got to answer to. If we’re a good boss, and we …

We’ve all got a choice to make. Do we do more, or do we do less? We could do less (any most people and businesses do). We could put in less effort. We could use cheaper materials. We could figure out what’s the bare minimum we have to do to get by and do that. Or, we could do more. …

We hear a lot in the news about creatures that are going extinct. It’s often sad that a cute little animal won’t be around anymore for future generations to enjoy, but it’s a harsh fact of life: things that are not able to adapt to changes in their environment get left behind. This rule applies to our businesses as well. …