Being in business can often prove frustrating. The people we’re working with often don’t know what we know (if they did, what would they need us for), and to make things even worse, even though they don’t know what we know, many of them don’t even care what we know. We could try to educate them, but really, what good …
The Whole Point
It’s hard to be different. When everyone else is doing the minimum, and you’re shooting for the stars, it’s easy to feel like a fool. People are going to call you out. Your competitors are going to laugh. Many potential clients are going to pass you by. Everyone will let you know that you’re not doing it like everyone else. …
The Easy Way Out
It’s easy to keep things on repeat; to keep doing the same thing we’ve always done. Doing it again is easy. Doing something different is hard. But, that’s life in a nutshell, isn’t it? Do we take the easy way out again and again, never going any further that we’ve gone before, or do we take a chance and do …
Pick a Winner
Talking about AI is all the rage right now, but it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll ever have an AI home inspector. There’s simply too much to do, too many places to crawl into, too much stuff to handle, and too many personalities to juggle to ever imagine someone figuring out how to turn that much computer programming into a profitable …
Ignored
Many people recoil from choice. They would much rather have things decided for them than to have to choose themselves. Many of our potential customers fall into this category, allowing someone else to decide for them who they’ll end up working with. Unless we make ourselves impossible to ignore, we’ll often find ourselves ignored.
One Things
When running our businesses, we can often fall into the trap of wanting to do too much. We’ve got grandiose ideas of being everything to everyone, and we end up so distracted and overwhelmed that we find ourselves being nothing to nobody. Better to pick one thing and do it to the best of our abilities. And then, maybe we …
You Do What, Exactly?
“So, what is it that you do?” It’s a question that we get asked. A lot. And not just when we meet someone new. It’s a question that potential clients ask all the time. They may not use those exact words, or any words for that matter, but it’s the number one question in their mind. And the better we …
That’s So…
We’ve all got something that makes us stand out. Something that’s different. Something that makes people think of us when the come across it. Something that’s uniquely us. So, why aren’t we using that thing (whatever it is) to help market our business? Being known for it is already half the battle…
The End of the Enterprise
Here’s another day of ranting about rules… One of the difficulties of running a small business, particularly a service-based business, is trying to figure out all the rules. Undoubtedly, there are going to be rules that are written down, likely imposed on us by some type of regulatory entity overseeing the people practicing in our field. One problem with written …
Playing by the Rules
Remember the excitement of getting a new game when we were young? It was always kind of rough when we started playing, because the rules were usually foreign to us and (if we wanted to play the game properly) we had to keep referring back to the rules to get our bearings. Running our business is a lot like learning …