I’ve been reading an interesting book – From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks and he brought up a perspective that I hadn’t thought about before. In the book, the context is around the idea of how we (collectively) look at creating our life. His take – based on research and personal experience – is […]

One of my favorite small business finance books* is Greg Crabtree’s Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits.  He takes what is typically viewed as a dry, painful topic and makes it compelling – and more importantly he cuts through a lot of noise and shares some excellent, practical advice on how to create a profitable […]

It’s the middle of the year and overall most businesses are continuing to ride the current economic growth cycle we’re on.  Weekly, we have clients talk about the challenges of finding employees to fill positions.   Amazon may be taking over the world but all-in-all there are still a lot of small businesses experiencing growth and […]

Peter Thiel makes a lot of excellent points in his book Zero to One – the overall theme of the book is a study of what successful innovation looks like (based primarily on tech start-ups). One of the main ideas in the book – that most of the really successful businesses have started by dominating a […]

It’s likely that you’ve met them before. It’s almost certain that you’ve passed by them on the street or at a chamber meeting and didn’t realize it. I’m talking about the overwhelmed, stressed out, I-can’t-imagine-this-can-ever-get-better business owner. They have an air of quiet desperation and they are foolishly hoping for that one big deal that […]

How would you like your business to perform 259% better than your competitors?  What if there was one thing (albeit a major thing) that you, as a business owner, could do that would create this huge competitive advantage?  Would you do it? Surprisingly, you probably wouldn’t.  Most business owners don’t view this approach as a […]