At some point in the growth of a business, every entrepreneur realizes that they need to shift their focus and work “on” their business instead of working “in” it. In fact, it has been written about so many times that many entrepreneurs actually believe that this is the one transition they need to plan for in […]
Tag Archives: Entrepreneur
Simplify Alignment with Framework Thinking
Entrepreneurs get started in business with a great idea and the energy to bring it to reality. Then they grow the business based on hard work. Hopefully that hard work translates into a growing team of exceptional team players around them. But at some point the outcomes of raw desire and entrepreneurial energy start to […]
Starting a Successful New Business – What’s the Headache?
When you are thinking about starting a successful new business, one of the first questions you need to be able to answer is: “What is the headache that I’m solving for, and how bad is the headache?”. You need to solve a problem for someone (your target customer) that they recognize (it is a headache) […]
What Are You Managing?
As a business owner you know that you are often called upon to wear many hats, working long hours to ensure the job gets done, your customer is satisfied, your staff are paid, next week’s marketing is complete, and your taxes and government remittances are taken care of. After all it’s been said many times […]
The Slipping Point
At some point in the evolution of even the most successful companies, an interesting thing happens – growth stalls. Even the brightest and most experienced Entrepreneurs and managers are perplexed as the things they did to create the initial growth in the company no longer drive new revenues. In fact if they stick with old […]
Out Of The Box Opportunities
There is a great article in this week’s BusinessWeek magazine entitled ‘Fertile Ground for Startups’ that illustrates the opportunities that are at hand for truly innovative ideas in today’s economy. The article outlines that investment by angel investors and venture capitalists is up significantly over the first half of this year, and that as many as 50,000 […]
Appropriate Management Controls for Small Business
For those that read this blog regularly or who have spoken with me at one of the various networking events that I regularly participate in you know that my passion is in creating growth through value innovation, but I have had a couple of conversations in the past week with colleagues in other businesses about […]
Interesting Small Business Statistics
While these statistics aren’t particularly new (they come from a 2005 Industry Canada report) I came across them this week while working on a white paper and I think they bear some brief discussion here. In Canada, 94.6% of businesses by number are ‘small’ meaning that they have less than 50 employees. The actual number startled me […]
Packaging Matters
As I noted in my last entry, platform thinking is a problem when you try to communicate the value of your product or service offering to a potential client. The problem is that I have been struggling with the same issue for the past couple of months and only now have been able to put together the […]
The Power of Connected Advisors
This week I have been lucky enough to meet a number of dynamic new people that I am happy to have added to my personal and professional network, and I am very thankful for the opportunity to have met them, learn about their businesses and challenges, and hopefully help them in some way to achieve […]