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 …

In today’s always on, interconnected world, it’s pretty easy for us to ask for (and get) feedback from our customers. Ask (or sometimes you don’t even have to ask) and ye shall receive. But what do we do with that feedback? What’s the point of all that information? Lots of times, the customers that take the time to leave us …

We’ve all heard the claim that people in modern society have got the attention span of a goldfish. While that claim’s been debunked, attention is still one of our most valuable resources, and it tends to be in very short supply. We don’t have a lot of time for it, and everyone and everything wants a piece of it. The …

Vires acquirit eundo. (We gather strength as we go.) Virgil, from Aeneid All too often we let things get to us. I can’t do it. It’s too hard. I’m just not cut out for this. I’m gonna do something else. I give up. We succumb to the pressure and move on to something easier. We reason that everybody else does …