Dave

There is a sad and preventable affliction that seems to affect almost every service-based business (and not just the small ones): denial. Specifically, it is inevitable that every employee is going to leave, and you probably won’t keep your employees until they retire. Yet, I’ve seen business owners and leadership teams put their companies into…

One of my pet peeves is the amount of clichéd advice I hear people spouting. Sometimes, the advice might actually be decent if followed. More often than not, people seem to enjoy repeating sayings depicting the ways they would like to behave. There is an underlying dishonesty in the way people use language. For instance,…

Part of what I didn’t realize when I made my grand belly flop in 2007, the year I first attempted self-employment, was the need to learn fundamental skill sets that were alien to me at the time. One such skill set, among others: I hadn’t learned to market myself. There are a lot of misconceptions…

A pet peeve of mine: people seem to want to “network” for no apparent purpose. You run into people who want to have coffee and talk about how to help each other. I’ve wasted countless hours of my life having one-time coffee meetings with people I never saw again, or worse…people who showed up with…

There are a lot of popular fantasies about self-employment and business ownership. One thing that really irks me about a lot of the online content I read about starting and running a business is how deceptively easy some people make the process sound. I remember seeing a cliche back in the early 2010s, where people…

For ten years of my career, I did a heavy amount of writing for clients who paid me to help them get their message out. I haven’t provided writing-for-hire services in years, but I still find myself putting my copywriter hat on frequently. In recent months, I’ve considered hiring someone to help me with my…

I used to write a lot more often. Those who have followed my trajectory since 2007 know that I used to do marketing and copywriting for a living. Between 2007 and 2012, I used to write much more heavily. I was trying to build a presence online. You could see peaks and valleys in my…

Underpricing As counterintuitive as it sounds, you can lose business by not charging enough. Good customers, who appreciate the value of things, will tend to avoid buying the cheapest solution because they will equate low price with low quality. The customers you do get will be a pain in the ass. They complain, blow up…