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Hiring yourself is a hard road to hoe. The ups and downs of running a business can leave you stressed, insecure, scared, doubtful and exhausted. And that’s on a good day. Then again, roller coasters aren’t so bad if you have people to scream with. And once you hear those voices, once you realize you’re not alone, once you find people to face the world with, the ride isn’t…

Mattering isn’t the problem. We know our work is great, and that it touches and inspires and brings joy to people all around the world. But it’s awfully hard to pay the mortgage with compliments. In order to keep our enterprise alive, in order to support our lifestyle and in order to underwrite our creative endeavors, we need to matter to the people who write checks – not just…

My friend Lloyd owns a farm. Having worked in the nursery and landscaping industry for more than three decades, I asked him how buyer behavior has evolved over the years. He summarized it nicely in five words:                  Make it for me now. That’s the expectation. That’s the baseline posture of today’s retail customer. They demand urgency and customization, and if they don’t get it, they’re one step away…

Delivery is not enough. When someone pays you money to perform a service for them, doing great work is the bare minimum. The big win is when you make clients look like heroes to the people who count on them. My friend Chris does video production with large corporations. The day he starts any project, he sends his contact person a link to a private webpage that maps out…

We can’t sit back and wait for the world to fall in love with us. The door must be opened from the inside. Despite our best efforts to attract what we want, magnetize people into our orbit and patiently wait until they respond to our passive invitation, eventually, we have to step up and make some noise. We have to go happen to things. We have to put ourselves…

Last year I spent four months chasing a potential client who didn’t respond to emails, cancelled multiple meetings, rarely followed up and essentially, left the project hanging without doing me the respect of simply saying no. I was officially pissed off. But instead of lashing out, I laced up. Instead of torturing myself waiting around for validation, I channeled my anger into an ambitious, risky and exciting project, one…

If the idea isn’t executed, we never had it. Regardless of size, quality, passion, practicality, coolness or marketability, until we physically ship the idea out the door, it doesn’t exist. That’s why ideas are free and execution is priceless. That’s why finished is the new perfect. That’s why version done is better than version none. Because ideas were never meant to stay that way. The true measure of success…

We’re told to avoid clichés like the plague. Then again, clichés start to matter when personal experiences remind us why people said them in the first place. Warnings about silk purses and sow’s ears never quite make sense until we spend four years in a toxic relationship desperately trying to morph our partner a clone of ourselves. So what we learn is that most clichés do represent genuine empathy….

Some businesspeople are afraid to act like people. Especially owners who are often terminally certain, unwilling to admit wrongdoing and allergic to apology. And because they’ve been around for thirty years, they never listen to anybody because the company has enough customers where they can afford not to care. Why personally respond to negative online reviews in a manner that blows people away and creates new customers for life?…

Most people have a business they need to build a brand for. I had brand I needed to build a business for. This was never my intention. I never made a formal decision to approach my enterprise in this manner. But ten years into it, I’m now starting to realize how much more lucrative it is to work from the inside out, as opposed to the outside in. When…