Posts
When Your Business Feels Like a Job
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…
How Not to Hire a Marketing Agency
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…
An Exercise for Creating Discipline
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…
10 Reasons Small Businesses Don’t Hit Their Numbers
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…
The #1 Reason Businesses Leave Money on the Table
Small business owners often struggle year after year to bring in enough cash to keep things going. Operating in constant “survival mode” is draining and leads to disillusionment. Most tragically, it usually can be avoided. The irony of the situation is that we tend to ignore our biggest opportunity, even when it is sitting right…
Why Business Owners Undervalue Their Time and Expertise
Being underpaid is quite possibly the number one issue affecting the world’s economy. Many of us have been there at one time or another, working long hours and having to beat the pavement just to find enough low-margin work to scrape by for one more month. The symptoms vary on the outside, but one thing…