If you’re a business owner, there are a lot of tangible things you have to think about if you want to be successful. You need to be profitable – which means you have a handle on your costs and that you have a pretty good idea of how to sell. You need to be able […]

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 […]

You’re probably familiar with the statistics on small business failure rates – based on a recent study, about 50% of small businesses (with employees) will fail within the first 5 years. It’s an interesting data point, but I think it’s also misleading. I think the problematic word is failure – it’s not that most of […]

I’ve recently talked to several business owners who are at a point where they are actively starting to think about exiting their business. I’ve also recently met with several business owners who are looking to aggressively grow their business. That’s not surprising considering what we do at Aspire, but what might be surprising to you […]

As a culture we’re obsessed with age and the passage of time – especially at this time of year (holidays and the whole New Year thing). I imagine you’ve heard a lot of things along the lines of; ‘Back in my day kids were (pick your favorite complaint)‘ – Or more simply just “Get off […]

The word ‘No’ gets a bad rap. Sure it has a negative connotation, arguably it’s the essence of negative, but there is a lot of power in a good ‘No’! The problem is that we’re innately wired to view ‘No’ as a problem – which means we don’t like saying it and we don’t like […]