Wouldn’t our jobs be wonderful if every one of our customers was the same? We’d know exactly what we needed to do and say and how to act to satisfy everyone. But that’s simply not the case. And while variety may be the spice of life, it’s certainly a pain when it comes to our clientele. Being able to think …

All too often we overthink things in our business. We spend a considerable amount of time thinking about our logo, thinking about our tag line, thinking about our mission statement, thinking about our marketing, thinking about how we’re going to get more business. Maybe instead of thinking so much, we should be doing.

We’re faced with difficult decisions in our business (and in our lives) every day. All too often, we choose to respond with the first idea that pops into our head. A better plan would be to stop and try to imagine how the situation will end. If the ending is not something that’s going to make our lives better, then maybe …

We like to think that the arc of progress in our careers is linear: we start at the bottom and gradually work our way up; that our graph moves steadily up and to the right. But it’s really not that simple. While growth quite often happens in a predictable fashion, sometimes it doesn’t. We can get stuck in a rut …

Fear is a great motivator. Whether we’re afraid of failing or (even worse) of succeeding, these feelings can destroy any chance of success. And regretting never taking that chance is something that will haunt us the rest of our lives. No one ever finds themselves on their deathbed wishing they’d streamed a few more episodes on Netflix, but staring down those …

We’ve got our best resource built right into our business: our customers. Asking for (and getting) feedback from them is more valuable than any ad or poll we can run. Good or bad, the opinions of our clients matter. The big question for us as small business owners is what, exactly, are we planning on doing with all that priceless …

While new business owners are taught to emulate those that have gone before them (which is not a bad way to get a business off the ground), it can put you in a tough position: trying to compete with those same businesses in an already crowded space. Why not put on our thinking caps and figure out how to offer …

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 …