A foundation is something, like a fact or an idea, upon which something is built. The sooner we develop a foundation for our business… The sooner we figure out who it is we’re supposed to be serving… The sooner we figure out what problems we’re trying to solve… The sooner we figure out exactly what it is that we’re offering …

We all want to be successful. It’s the reason we got into business in the first place. But success can have a downside too: it can cause us to lose our humility. When we start out in our new career, we’re often overwhelmed by a feeling of incompetence: we have no idea what we’re supposed to be doing. Once we …

It seems that much of our life is spent jockeying for position, trying to figure out who’s more important than the other person in our daily interactions; struggling to determine our status roles in each one of our relationships. We all like to think that things would be better if we were in charge of every situation. But the reality …

Many jobs in the new economy are jobs for creators. Creators are different from normal employees in the workplace. A teller gets paid for the number of hours that they’re at the bank, doing their job. Our job is different. We’re creating something out of thin air. Creating something for our clients. We don’t get paid an hourly wage, and …

Marketing our business can be a rough proposition. Throw in the fact that home inspectors are generally marketing to two different audiences, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Well, maybe not disaster, but at least a big headache. Or maybe a pain in the backside. We’re trying to get the attention of the gatekeeper (the real estate agent) while …

As a business owner, and as a human, we fear rejection. We worry all the time about not sealing the deal. We hate being rejected. We’re often crushed when it happens, believing that someone else doesn’t think that we’re good enough for them. Rejection can have a long-lasting, detrimental effect on us. It’s only natural for us to assume that …

Personalization: the process of making something suitable for the needs of a particular person.(Cambridge dictionary). The word personalization used to be taboo in the world of business. A company produced one thing, and that was that. You got what you got, and you liked it. Thank you sir, may I have another? Kevin Bacon, Animal House, 1978 Today’s world is …

No one likes getting pitched. Cold-calls during dinner. Marketing emails delivered right to our desktop. Ads jumping right into our social media feed. Junk mail landing in our mail box. It’s all around us, and we hate it. Until, that is, it solves a problem. Whenever there’s something we like, want, or need, and someone’s pitch scratches that specific itch, …

Learning new skills is a part of life, and an important part of starting a new business. We all move through Broadwell’s “Four Stages of Competence” at our own speed, paced solely by our desire to get better at our newly acquired skill: the more we want it, the more we work at it. Being stuck in “conscious incompetence” really …

Every day of our lives, we’re faced with challenges. They seem to come at us from all sides; a non-stop, constant, unrelenting number of items to add to our to-do list. We’re left running around like crazy, trying to come up with workable solutions to “problems” that really don’t matter that much. The challenge is not figuring out how to …