You don’t pick your family but you do pick your business community - and they are a second family of choice.  Surround yourself with good people and they will up your game, watch your back and genuinely help you succeed.  Good people will talk about what is tough and noodle how to get through it.  [...]

Until recently I was a hardcore how-to reader, spending time inhaling nonfiction.  Why waste time on made-up stories when how-to do everything is indexed neatly in the library?  How-to books make you smarter. They break things into steps even a monkey can do! They strip away narrative and serve up facts gathered from lifetimes of [...]

How much time do you estimate you spend thinking about your business?  It probably ranges from - every waking moment to only when I can shut it off.
The real heavy lifting of the entrepreneur’s journey is the thinking process.  Our work is problem solving on the fly.  To do this we are supposed to know [...]

Is your day filled with creating new business opportunities or is it sequestered by a flurry of  emails, tweets and social media interactions without much to show for it at the end of the day?  There is a great distinction between being busy and working.  Busy is exhausting.  Working is exhilarating.
Busy is ducking from the [...]

Did you ever notice how incredibly hard it is to express your company in words? To say exactly what you do without sounding like everyone else? The trickiest thing in this business environment is the ability to evolve quickly and then capture this in consistent messages - Now if that isn’t an an oxymoron, I [...]

After the blush and expense of getting your small business website up - you may have noticed THAT IT’S ALREADY TIME TO EVOLVE - DANG IT!
Transforming your company website from an online brochure to a customer engagement tool is the next vista of the journey.
Luckily we have incredibly smart, skilled people among us [...]

I have started two companies - one backwards and the other with planning.  The one I knew nothing about was much easier than the one I thought I knew something about.  Here are both formulas for your reference.
Company 1
Epiphany + no clue + limited skills + first client falls in lap x ignorance and [...]

The more inbound links your website has the better.  This raises your visibility in the search engines. (SEO)
You link to us, we link to you and everybody wins.  It’s not rocket science.
It’s with great pleasure that we announce PROJECT INBOUND - the more the merrier Link Fest.  Calling every Big Ooga member - whether you [...]

Image by kevindooley via Flickr
I worry about myself when everything is in order.  Isn’t a neat office the sign of an empty mind? How is it possible that my accountant and bookkeeper have overcome my chaos? How is it feasible that my efficiency expert has delivered on her promise to “get more done so I [...]

Image by Ioan Sameli via Flickr
After reading countless stories about deals that fell through -  I want to share with you a famous story that I resented reading, but in retrospect have found comforting.
Ping - A Frog in Search of a New Pond by Stuart Avery - tells of a frog who needs a new  [...]