Make It Happen!

Being a business owner has many perks as well as many responsibilities.  Starting out can be hard and there are many bumps along the way.  As the owner, you get the pleasure of not only being the owner, but being the janitor, the receptionist, the salesman, the laborer, the IT department, the marketing team and the CEO all in one package!  One of the biggest moments for a small business owner is when he or she gets to actually hire the first employee for the business.  This is a pivotal moment for any entrepreneur and it should be met with as much thought and significance as it deserves.  What exactly does being the BOSS mean?  Who works for whom?  Who is the team and who is the coach?  These are questions worth considering and seriously addressing when you begin to hire staff and form a team.  At this point in the business, you have earned the great privilege of directly affecting another person’s life as well as the lives of those who...

Our products and our services, in whatever business we are involved with, become so familiar to us that we often forget that not everyone is as passionate or knowledgeable about them as we are.  Ultimately, we want to be successful in business, and in order to do that it is imperative that we deliver a clear message to the target customer that will prompt them to get excited about our products or decide they need our services.  If that message isn't conveyed in their language and triggering those internal pivot points, then we need to change our perspective to parallel our consumer. Customers make decisions based on first what they need and second on what they want .  This movement is full of gray area as that is often not a black and white process.  Sometimes as consumers as in life, we find ourselves justifying the want before the need even though we know it isn’t the most practical thing to do.  The best thing you can do in business is to m...

In our business and professional world, everyone seems focused on goals and results.     Although there is merit to people who are goal focused and produce positive results, we often overlook a valuable part of reaching those objectives. What happens between the starting point to the finish line can be the most important part of an initiative.  This is what I refer to as the process.  We are always in such a hurry to finish a project, to know the outcome and to have the end results that we rush through the process and forget to take in what was learned and how we grew professionally. We can correlate this to other more emotionally driven things that occur in life. We have all heard the saying…”it isn’t about the destination, but the journey that matters…” or something to that effect.  There is a great deal of truth in that, and we must remind ourselves to take it in.  We have to be aware of what is going on and happening as we...