My parents were a bit unconventional growing up. To start with, my mom worked. For perspective, in the 1970s, she was the only working mom I knew — none of my friends’ moms had jobs let alone a career. My parents were also small-business owners with a few different irons…
How hard has it been to find or keep skilled workers lately? If you’re like most professionals I talk with, it’s next to impossible. Even if we weren’t contending with a global health crisis, there never seems to be enough people available to get the job done. Now that you need twice as...
Diversity, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary, “is the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, genders, and sexual orientations.”
It is well known that in business, diversity and inclusion are key…
The first rule of scaling a business is “Don’t worry about the rules of scaling a business.” If you’re copying others, then you’re always following their lead, which means you pick up breadcrumbs instead of getting the loaf. Instead, look for the leverage only you can create.
That requires an innovative strategy on three fronts…
1. Build business before buzz
“It’s enticing to spend on sexy things like PR and events. But while awareness is great — and needed — you want to make sure you have the distribution set up to fully take advantage of the awareness. Early on, we spent on those things to build buzz, but we didn’t have enough retail distribution…
We live in a world with so much noise. We are constantly bombarded with a “click here”, “subscribe there” or “If you buy this x product your life will be so much better,” — you get the point.
Here’s the deal, marketing changes all the time. What worked…
You've finally got your company on solid ground. Now you might consider taking funds to accelerate growth.
A pattern that I often see in small to medium sized businesses is that they become scared to take on debt after they have made it out of the...