On the surface, it all looks pretty simple. But if we take the time to look a little closer, different layers start to emerge. That relationship is more nuanced than we thought. This client needs more attention than we anticipated. A seemingly easy job just turned into a four-alarm fire. All too often we stop at the surface, not knowing …

It’s a balancing act, running a business. It takes a lot of thought to figure out what we’re supposed to be doing. Some people want more than others. Some want less. A few clients may know what we know, but most of them don’t. Some customers want things as simple as possible, dumbed down to the most basic level, while …

But I’m doing the best that I can. Are we, really, doing our best? Is there no room for improvement? Couldn’t we take an extra course to learn how to be more efficient? Are we really that pressed for time? Can’t we turn off Netflix for the night and do something productive? Are we really 100% focused on what we’re …

We spend a lot of our time paying attention to things in the media. Cable news feeds, radio broadcasts, podcasts, email newsletters, Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, Instagram stories, and on and on. There’s certainly nothing wrong with staying up to date with the happenings of the day. The problem comes in when the news cycle starts to consume our lives. …

In the world of digital business, we often talk about creating a marketing funnel as a way to acquire customers. Simply put, it’s the process of potential customers finding your business and following a path to becoming paying customers. And just like a real funnel, lots of people enter the top of the funnel but only a few come out …

One of the problems with working in a specialty industry (like being a home inspector) is that most people have no idea what it is we do. And it’s hard to sell someone on your service if they have no idea what that service entails. The first thing we need to do is explain what it is that we do …

Humans tend to find comfort in community. We like to be with other people that are similar to us and we often strive to be like people that are similar to us. We’ve evolved to understand that being different is often dangerous. If all the members of our tribe were hiding in their caves and we decided to be different …

At one point or another in our lives, we’ve all crammed for a test. The night before (or right before) a big exam, we tried our best to learn a whole bunch of information in a really small amount of time. We know that we’d have been better off studying a little bit of the material every day, taking in …

Our lives would be so much easier of we could just jump right to the good stuff. Skip all the fluff, all the filler, all the starts and stops and dead ends, and just put our best stuff out there. No gradual increase, no iterations, no changes to make it better, just start out with a finished product. We don’t …

When most people start out in a new business, they try to generate a lot of buzz to get their name out there. They use some type of big marketing splash, cards and brochures everywhere, social media blast across networks, huge parties, hiring a skywriter (OK, no one really does that anymore…), to make sure that everyone knows that they’re …