Guest Post By Mary Madsen, writer for Bellevue University (Learn more about Mary at the end of this post) The number of female students graduating from college recently surpassed the number of men graduating from college. The number of college graduates continuing their education for post graduate degrees is also increasing and women make up a large percentage of … [Read more...]
Is it Okay to think Customers are stupid?
RyanAir CEO Michael O’Leary made headlines this week when he argued that a customer in Spain deserved to pay $380 for having RyanAir print a boarding pass. He went even further when he said that “all passengers are stupid who think we will change our policies or our fees”. I’ve been thinking about this statement all morning and I can’t shake the bad taste it’s left in my … [Read more...]
Money, Friendship and Business
Inevitably in the life of an entrepreneur there comes a time where friendship, money and business collide. Sometimes the collision is disastrous, sometimes it is a saving grace but the one thing that is certain is that it is never easy. I recently encountered a situation where all three of these things collided and here is what I learned. Be specific and be sure Communication … [Read more...]
Love What You Do
Love is the Missing Piece No, this isn’t an ad for a dating site, although maybe it should be.... I was in the process of writing on a different subject when I found myself in a conversation with a client (who shall remain nameless but will likely know its them when they read this ;) ) We were discussing their business and a particularly rough couple of weeks they have … [Read more...]
Why are you important?
As we create our businesses more often than not we get caught up in the day to day firefighting strategies. What we don’t do because there isn’t enough time in the day, no one has figured out how to clone ourselves and/or we don’t see the immediate value is define a future strategy. It’s easy to spend so much time in our businesses that we don’t work on them, so here are a few … [Read more...]
Is it time to stop running your business?
There are things in life that are inevitable, love, death, taxes and the failure of a business. Knowing that doesn’t make the pain any easier to deal with so if you are facing the decision of when to quit and when to hang on, I have four pearls of wisdom (ahem, at least in my mind) for you to consider. Did you give it your best shot? Hindsight is 20/20 and when making the … [Read more...]
Time is Love
There is a new song out by Josh Turner entitled "Time is Love". Every time I hear this song it is a mini-exercise in personal and professional strategic planning for me. How often do we think about where we spend our time- and really get honest with ourselves? How often do we think about what we really care about, what matters most? And the final step... how often do we … [Read more...]
The Myth of Talented Applicants
Yesterday I had the wonderful experience of attending a STEM collaboration workshop and the one question that kept running through my mind was, is it really a lack of talented applicants or are small businesses just inept at using technology to help us recruit the right people? Here are the three things that stuck. Talent is a Myth Talent is subjective at best and if … [Read more...]
Stop The Overwhelm! Creating Order In Your Business
I just received an email letting me know that I can download over a $1,000,000 as a gift if I put my name into a poll to see if I was to be chosen. Really? There is already such an overwhelming amount of information consuming our sacred time and vying for our attention, that the amount of overwhelm is consuming us. The first time I recognized this online was a book launch … [Read more...]
Dealing with Difficult Personalities
Leadership is one of those jobs that no matter how good the pay, it is never enough for the amount of personality issues you deal with. Well this morning as I had the honor of dealing with a difficult personality, I managed to garner a few nuggets of wisdom. Remember they have a point While this nugget is hard to swallow when the difficult personality has decided to … [Read more...]