If we want to be at the top of our field, we’ve got to keep ourselves in eternal building mode, continuously adapting and perfecting our product. That doesn’t mean that we hold back from shipping our product until it’s perfect. We need to ship in order to garner the feedback necessary to iterate. But we should never rest on our …

Increasing our skill level is a repetitive process. To continue to grow we need to keep facing increasingly difficult problems that force us to expand our knowledge base. It may be easy to ride the coattails of our previous growth but it won’t get us any further than we’ve already been. 

Studies have shown that there really isn’t much of an advantage for different age, education level, sex, race, or background when it comes to being a successful salesperson. The one thing that ultimately separates the good from the bad is perseverance: having faith that no matter how many times you’ve got to ask, you’re eventually going to close the sale. Good …

Getting a new business up and running can be a challenge. Copying what other successful businesses are doing can be a useful shortcut for those just getting started. Just be aware that everyone else is doing the same thing. The key to successfully implementing this strategy is to figure out something useful from another industry and migrating that idea (heretofore unknown …

Too many new entrepreneurs use cheap pricing as the sole driver of their business. Doing so presents a whole host of problems. Among them are the need to sell more products to meet our revenue goal, which means more clients to manage than our higher priced competitors. Lower pricing attracts lower quality customers, inviting more problems for us to deal with, …

Customers are the lifeblood of our business and we should choose them wisely. If we decide to do business with just any potential client, then we shouldn’t be upset when we’re faced with a less than stellar customer base. We should be working hard to make our customers part of an exclusive club, and they should know that they’re a part …

When starting a business, we’re often forced to bootstrap our way forward. We’re usually limited on finances, so we do things the cheapest way possible. Doing things this way really isn’t a problem, until we reach a point where it is. (Hopefully) we will eventually reach a point in our business where we need to move past the startup mindset in order …

Last year I was a (insert your profession here) who needed to learn more about what I do for a living. This year, same question. Same answer.

There are many definitions for the word “tone.” The one most important here comes from the Cambridge Dictionary: “a quality in the voice that expresses the speaker’s feelings or thoughts, often toward the person being spoken to…” The tone of our work, our product, our marketing, the clothes we wear, the vehicle we drive, the way we interact with our …

Change is scary; there’s no doubt about it. We’re often afraid of changing the way we do things, especially in our business. We think that we’ll cause an uproar; that everyone will be enraged and that we’ll cause a big stink. The reality is that it’s quite likely that most people won’t even notice. Most of us are so involved …