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Nancy Sharp, CEO of Food for Thought gave us some strong entrepreneur advice last night.  She’s built a company from Zip to $25 mil in revenue.  Here are a few key points. 1. You have two choices. Lay down or get up. 2. Own your confidence – if you don’t believe in yourself no one [...]

Last year I was operating under the old ratio of:  busy tasks vs. priority tasks.  The equation looked like this:  600 + 4 = a day in the life of an entrepreneur. The 600 represents everything other than what you should actually be doing -  reading possibly important stuff, looking for stuff, responding to stuff, [...]

Image via Wikipedia I don’t try to act “AS IF” I am successful or happy.  When I try, it’s to act “AS IF” I’m normal.  There have been plenty of times when I thought I WAS normal only to find out that I wasn’t. I’d like to take you back to my first real business [...]

It all started with detailed plans to take a trip to the GrapeHound Festival in upstate New York.  My trip-savvy daughter made the arrangements and planned to pick me up at the airport with her Greyhound and “my Greyhound” June.   We’d drive to an “adorable cabin” in a gorgeous National Park and spend the week-end taking the dogs to their doggie fair to eat doggy ice cream in kookie [...]

There is a distinction between making a living and building a company.  Both are entrepreneurial, but the approach is very different. Breaking out of your box means understanding business models and putting them into effect. Making a living means finding a stream of customers or clients who want what you sell or do and doing more of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]