It’s hard. It’s hard to start a business. It’s hard to build up a client base. It’s hard to create a worthwhile product. It’s hard to become a success in your market. Maybe the fact that it’s hard to do is a good thing. That means that most of your competitors aren’t going to have the guts to try it.

We often feel as if we’re falling behind. That someone else is doing better than us. That another company is moving ahead. That our competition is leaving us in the dust. But does any of that stuff really even matter? As long as we’re getting to where we want to be, what difference does it make what someone else is …

Don’t judge a book by its cover. George Eliot For as long as we can remember, we’ve been told that we shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover; that things aren’t always as they seem; that it’s what’s inside that really matters. But people make decisions based on outward appearances and first impressions all the time. If we’re walking down …

We spend a lot of our time worrying about things that we screwed up in the past. We spend a lot of our time planning the things that we’d like to do in the future. We spend nowhere near enough time working on the things we should be doing today. Instead of figuring out ways to waste time, maybe we …

No matter how long we’ve been working, how good we are at our jobs, or how many times we’ve done this before, we’re all going to end up having problems. It’s inevitable. Like the song says, troubles gonna come my way. So, what are we gonna do about it? Do we freak out? Do we freeze up? Are we going …

Maybe it’s because we work in a mysterious field. Maybe it’s because people really don’t know what we do. Maybe it’s because we (and everyone else before us) did a bad job of clarifying exactly what we bring to the table.  Regardless of the reason why we’re in this predicament, it’s up to us to get ourselves out of it. …

All too often, as business owners we try to be everything to everyone, offering our clients a dizzying array of products and choices. We may have good intentions, wanting to provide whatever products we think our customers might need, or we may have suspect intentions, looking to vacuum up every last dollar from our client’s wallet. Regardless of our motivations, …

New. This one word is enough to strike fear into the hearts of business owners. It means giving up a well-worn routine. It means we’re going to have to relearn something we thought we already knew. It means that we’re going to have to take some time out of our schedules that we weren’t anticipating. It means we’re going to …

It all comes down to how much we care. We can do the bare minimum and skate by. We can stick to the script and do what we have to. We can follow the rules exactly as they’re written, providing the least amount of value that we can get away with. And, technically, there’s nothing wrong with that. Lots of …

Pleasing a customer is a difficult proposition. We’ve done this a million times. We already know exactly what everybody wants. We think we’ve got it down. And we’d be wrong. Maybe we’ve got a good idea of what most people want, but there’s no way we can know what everybody wants. Well, maybe there is. We can just ask them.