Over the past 15 years, I have consulted and coached new entrepreneurs, who were considering leaving the paycheck comfort of a salary job to becoming part of the You Economy.
As we all roll into the New Year, consider taking a tour of your 2016 calendar and build a +- Review Sheet. It may offer insights to what to do more of and less of in 2017 to keep your emotions in check.
Build momentum into 2017 by asking your top 3 customers what it would take to get an incremental increase in business within your specialty. Ask about what your competitors are doing and how you can assist for a small percentage of increased business.
If you have an upcoming presentation, investor pitch, platform talk or round table, consider redrafting your talk to make it much shorter and concise. Yes this is common sense, but it’s very difficult to do. If your allotted speaking time is for 10 minutes, draft your presentation to be completed in 4 minutes.
One of the ongoing challenges many founders will face at some point is the dreaded capital raise beyond friends and family. I have not met many entrepreneurs’ who actually enjoy the idea of going out to the market and asking for money. This year has been a typical year for us evaluating over 100 capital raise deals and most will never get funded for one specific reason – the PASSION is not directed to what matters most – EXECUTION.
The Branding Pyramid and 21 Brand Monitoring Ideas
Recently, I was speaking with a good friend who was considering leaving his long-term employer (financial services industry) and starting a business around his life passion of wine. He has become quite the expert in the space and has a unique idea centered on education and an online inventory platform. From a 10,000-foot viewpoint his concept appears to offer value to the market and he has a following of fans that love his content within this wide space of the wine industry.
Outsourcing, the word so popular in the 1990’s and today everything is “disruption”. Two different things of course but have many crossovers to life and business.
For those of you who are accountants or tax preparers, this is “hell week”. Hopefully, you have completed your tax returns or have a good idea of what payment to send along with your extensions. The week will be a blur for those of you in the profession and after 25 years doing tax work, it seems like the weekend will never arrive. Keep in mind, April 18th is the last day to file this year.
Mindfulness, yoga, Zen – the buzz words we hear every day that we must do because of our over stimulated, hyper-connected, high stress world as a business owner. There are so many things going on at once in many cases as an entrepreneur and in many times its difficult to focus on one thing instead of capital requirements, marketing, sales, distribution, employee morale, financials,new partners, etc. all at once. One more thing to add to the endless list – Mindfulness. Can it really help your business?