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Habits
COMPOUNDING SUCCESS: Little Changes Build On One Another
I read lots of books. One of the things that happens when you read so much, is that you forget the lessons from one book if you don’t immediately apply them, or even worse you mistakenly combine lessons from one book with contradictory lessons from another another and...
My Favorite Centering Exercise: THE LONG AND RAMBLING EMAIL
“I don’t know what I want!” is a lament that I get from clients all the time. They know they want SOMETHING, but often times that comes in the form of “shoulds” that have been prescribed by someone else: parents, teachers, self-help gurus, industry standards, or the...
DO ONE THING: Stop Trying to Do Everything
PROCESS OVER PRODUCT: Why Habits Are More Important Than Goals
Alabama football coach Nick Saban wins football games. He also wins national championships...with regularity. During the eleven years Saban has served as head football coach, Alabama has compiled an overall official record of 146-21, 14 bowl game appearances with 10...
Talent Doesn’t Matter: Why Consistent Effort Always Works
When it comes to achievement, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that we are often talented in the area of our giftedness. For instance, I believe that one of my gifts is that of being able to quickly a) see the path to a solution for a client and b)...
Leadership
My Favorite Leadership Development Model: APPRENTICESHIP FOR WINNERS
My Favorite Leadership Style: The Benevolent Dictator
There is a great debate amongst businesspeople as to which leadership style is the “best” leadership style. A quick search on “which leadership style should I use” will produce literally millions of results covering hundreds of different types of leadership. So it’s...
Leadership Lesson #3: Closing The Loop
I don't know about you, but I LOVE starting things. New businesses, new projects, new conversations. If it’s NEW, I love it. This is one of the characteristics that most entrepreneurs share. It’s what makes us get out of bed in the morning and do the things that “mere...
When Micromanaging is the Best Strategy
No one is exactly sure where the term micromanaging came from, but when asked if it was ever okay to micromanage your employees, most small business owners would respond with a resounding NO! This level of hyper control has been shown to drive both motivation and...
My Personal Guide to Help You Build Your Own Junto
Benjamin Franklin is one of the most well-known historical Americans having invented or having significant influence upon our understanding of such things as electricity, ocean currents, population, and demography and meteorology. He even invented the most popular...
Leadership Lesson #1: Banks of the River
Entrepreneurs ae habitual micromanagers. Most of the time this stems from a single fear; Fear that their employees won’t do the job “right” (whatever that means). While there are plenty of strategies for getting employees to the point where we can trust them to do the...
You Can’t Do Everything, So Do One Thing Well: THE HEDGEHOG CONCEPT
Every entrepreneur that I work with has a similar problem: They want to do EVERYTHING. Afterall, part of the allure for them to pursue entrepreneurship was to be able to have CHOICE in their activities, IMMUNITY from the constraints set by others, and ultimately...
Your Busyness is Hurting Your Business: GO DEEP OR GO HOME
“How are you doing?” “I’m SO busy!” “That’s so great!” Or even worse…. “How are you doing? Are you busy?” Somehow, “busyness” has become a status symbol of the elite and wealthy, but does anyone really know why? When did busyness become the standard for success? Was...
THE UNPLUGGED WEEK: How to Use Personal Retreats to Accelerate Your Success
Why Are You Doing This? Finding the REAL Purpose Behind Your Business
When I met my first coach, Gary, in person for the first time many, many years ago, he asked me two questions: “Who Are You?” “Why Are You Here?” To be honest, I thought that these questions were slightly ridiculous, as prior to our first in-person meeting we had...
Business is Simple, but it’s not Easy. Uncomplicate Your Business Model.
“You’re making this too hard.” A popular phrase I often repeat to clients. As I spend time with entrepreneurs and business owners each week “You’re making this too hard,” is something that I find myself saying over and over again. It generally comes across as some...
Beyond Blind Ambition: The Mexican Fisherman
Over the years, a parable has been making the rounds of entrepreneurial magazines, websites, and even the walls of Jimmy John’s restaurants. It’s known by a few different titles - “The Banker and the Fisherman” or “The Mexican Fisherman” – and it brings a lesson in...
Repurposing A Danish Winter Tradition: Hygge for Business
It’s no secret to my friends that, although I’m probably less than 15% Danish, I love my Danish heritage. At my wedding my mother made a Danish wedding cake and we froze 25 bottles of the “delightfully” caraway and dill flavored Danish Aquavit in blocks of ice and our...
Why I Think Work Life Balance Is a Joke
Google “work life balance” and you’ll receive about 601,000,000 results in .40 seconds. That’s more than Mother Teresa (119,000,000), kitten videos (286,000,000) and Stormy Daniels (48,600,000) combined. (Yes, I realize that I just referenced Mother Teresa and Stormy...
Why Every Small Business Owner Should Stop Hustling
How Overthinking Is Slowing Killing You: YOU DON’T NEED A PLAN Z
A huge part of my “job” (we’re all volunteers) as the Crew Chief for the “world’s greatest race team,” the Cactus Warriors, is to do all of the planning for the race. This is a non-inclusive list of some of the things that I am responsible for planning for the team:...
STOICISM 101: The Best Toolset for an Uncertain World
After I got sick in 2016 with debilitating panic and anxiety attacks, a friend of mine turned me on to a book by Ryan Holiday called The Obstacle Is The Way. The book is inspired and rooted in the practical philosophy of Stoicism, but it does not explicitly teach...
DITCH THE EGO: How To Love Yourself While Being Yourself
One of the things that I often see in clients in my coaching practice is an over-abundance of “ego.” I put it in quotes because, according to the philosopher Sigmund Freud, the ego is simply the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious....
We Are Talented in the Area Of Our Giftedness: EMBRACE YOUR GIFTS
“What qualifies you to do this work?” It’s a question that I’m asked quite often. While I’m tempted to respond that I have an MBA, or that I’ve worked with over 150 entrepreneurs over the past 18 years, or that I’ve helped business owners create literally millions of...
Stop Dipping Your Toe In The Entre-waters: Complete Commitment
Each week, when I meet with my clients I ask them the same question, “On a scale from 1-10, what is your level of commitment to your own success?” Of course, to the number, each of my clients responds, “10!” I, of course, know that this isn’t always the case, and they...
Business Is A Battlefield: Six Distinctions Between Winning and Losing
As the son of an Air Force Colonel who spent the entirety of my childhood growing up on military installations and with military people, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I look at war as a fitting metaphor for both life and business. The main difference between war...
RUB SOME DIRT ON IT: How To Recover From Painful Setbacks
“Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and continuous struggle.” ~Napoleon Hill. Failure is nothing new to most entrepreneurs and small business owners. Unless you are especially lucky, or particularly new at this game, you’ve likely had your fair...
FROM FEAR TO FAITH: How To Create Real Life Miracles In Your Business
In 2002, in the middle of some very dark times for me, my friend Sam gave me a copy of a book called Love Is Letting Go Of Fear by Dr. Gerald D. Jampolsky. It was a short, large format book with lots of pictures, so the chances of me actually reading it were pretty...
OWNER VICTIM DISTINCTIONS: Reinvigorate Your Personal Power
In my work with small business owners and entrepreneurs, I am often confronted by a client who simply can’t seem to take personal responsibility for his or her company…or for that matter his or HERSELF. There’s always SOMETHING weighing them down. An employee is...
YOU ARE NOT TOO OLD; Why your 40s, 50s and 60s are a great time to launch something new
A few years back I was infatuated with everything that Gary Vaynerchuk had to say. I was “hustling” and working my “5-9” and using the F-Word in every conversation (okay, I’m still working on that one). I’ve since given up my GaryVee fan-boy status, but I retained...
You Can’t Save Your Way To Prosperity: KNOW WHEN TO SPEND
Dave Ramsey is awesome. I love his stuff. I think his book Total Money Makeover, his radio show, and his financial literacy course, Financial Peace University, are amazing tools for people who want to get control of their personal finances. There’s only one problem:...
How Much Should You Spend?: MARKETING ROI FOR DUMMIES
“Exposure is what homeless people die from” - Marketing Exec I used to work with Every time I start working with an entrepreneur, I send them a “housekeeping” email asking them for several very important pieces of information such as business plans, mission and vision...
PROFIT IS KING: Bringing The Bottom-Line to Top of Mind
Financial Reporting Process
In 1998 when I first started in business, the very first thing that I did was buy a stand alone copy of QuickBooks for Business. I think it was around $400 back then and a huge expense for a startup company. But I knew I “needed” it because everyone was using it. I...
A Foolproof WEEKLY MEETING SCHEDULE That Will Release You To Operate As Your Best Self
“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.” – Dave Barry “Bro, the last thing in the world that I need in my life is more meetings!” My friend Nick was...
Your Goals Suck: Why The Process Matters More Than The Result
Okay, your goals don’t really suck. I’m actually a big fan of goals. In fact, the bigger the goal, the better, as far as I’m concerned. I have all of my clients prepare 180-day goals for me immediately when we start working together. The idea being that if they have...
Why You Should Pick Really Big Goals
In Issue #1 I shared the first part of this story: In February of 2012, just 13 months before my 40th birthday, I stepped on the scale and weighed a whopping 238.3 pounds. At 5’11” this weight put me squarely into the “morbidly obese” category. I was ashamed and...
Control Your Time Using The Optimal Week
Do you remember when you started (or bought) your business? You had this thing called “hope”. Hope that finally THIS would be your ticket out of the rat race. Hope that you would now be able to control your life and your time. Hope that by creating this new venture...
Kill Your Annual Plan – And Do This Instead (12 Week Year)
When I was getting my MBA back in the mid-90’s, the focus on planning was VERY real. Business plans, marketing plans, exit plans, strategic plans, etc., were all the rage and it seemed like all you really needed to be successful was an idea, a copy of BizPlan Builder...
SBPB Secret Weapon: The Sunday Planning Session
I run into entrepreneurs all the time who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to simply “make it” through each day. The hit the ground running in the morning, rush through their day constantly moving from one task to the next, never even...
What the Grinch Can Teach Us About Making Friends
My Dad spent the majority of his career as an officer in the United States Air Force. Which meant that I spent nearly all of my childhood moving from place to place following my Dad around to his next promotion. Growing up as a military “brat” was actually pretty...