When I was about 27 I uttered a statement one afternoon while my team was wrestling with some customer service challenges. “The quality of our questions determines the quality of our business.” The statement was provoked by our company’s inability to consistently deliver the experience I wanted. Dumb problems were frustrating me. Problems I felt [...]

Small business owners. CEOs. Executives. Leaders. Whether you’re a #1 or a #2 or a team leader…surrounding yourself with others who are like you is one of THE most powerful learning, understanding and growing tools you can find. Business people in every role, up and down the authority chain, benefit from being around others who [...]

Today I want to provoke you to take a quantum leap forward. It may be uncomfortable. Maybe it’ll be exciting. Let’s just give it our best to make it profitable. Learning. Understanding. Growing. Let’s start with a word. An important word. One that should remain at the forefront for you the rest of this year [...]

Increasingly I’m convinced there is one factor that is far superior to all others in determining our success. Some of my favorite terms are… Tenacity Resilience Ferocity They speak to a person’s refusal to quit. And I’m not talking about quitting things that aren’t working. Or quitting things that we discover we don’t want to [...]

Almost 30 years ago I had a conversation with an owner of a small business who was lamenting the smallness of his business (which wasn’t so small really since he was generating multi-millions in annual revenue). “I’m not a neighborhood store, ” he complained. “They want to make me a neighborhood store.” I reminded him [...]

Growing up in the era where business was considered a zero-sum game – meaning, I win at your expense or you win at my expense – competition was fostered. Prized. You wanted to dominate and ruin the competition. The object, which never happened in my experience, was to have the market all to yourself. In [...]