Most entrepreneurs understand the value of metrics to evaluate and maximize business outcomes and success. A commonly overlooked metric is the lifetime value of a customer, defined as the projected profit a customer will generate over their entire relationship. There are significant benefits for using the lifetime value of a customer benchmark in business planning […]

Becoming Highly Referable Referrals are powerfully important and are consistently ranked as one of the best ways to generate valuable new business. While other sales and marketing avenues do generate new business, they are typically are more costly and provide a lower return on investment than referrals from existing customers. Referrals tend to be more […]

Networking Best Practices Business networking can be among the best return-on-investment methods to develop new business and to meet new, qualified prospects. While many other marketing initiatives may require significant financial investment, business networking requires the investment of valuable time. How can we ensure that our time investment will generate the results that we seek? […]

Do You Think to Talk or Talk to Think In life and business we enter into many different kinds of conversations. In these conversations, we find that there are typically two types of communication styles. Some people “Think to Talk”, and others “Talk to Think”. How we interact with other Talk to Think, and Think […]

Overcoming Self-Doubt Self-doubt impacts everyone, including highly accomplished people in all walks of life. It can make us feel overwhelmed, think we are not up to the task, and pessimistic about our probability of success. Research shows that self-doubt can significantly diminish our performance in business and life. How do we as entrepreneurs, who regularly […]

Continuously Raising the Bar Entrepreneurs are particularly good at raising the bar for themselves and their businesses. Because we hear this saying so often and it is part of our societal conversation, we may not realize we have converted this concept of encouragement into another form we describe as continuously raising the bar. Instead of […]

Rewarding “A” while hoping for “B” As entrepreneurs it is essential that we have awareness about reward systems so that we create the outcomes we hope for. We need every dollar of our investment and hour of our time to count. By increasing our awareness about reward systems we are more likely to generate the […]

The Flywheel and the Entrepreneur A flywheel is a very heavy revolving wheel that is used in some cases to increase a machine’s momentum. In 2001, Jim Collins published the book Good to Great and turned the flywheel into a well-known business term. He used the flywheel to illustrate one of his team’s observations about […]

The Maximizer – Satisficer Decision Making Continuum There are a number of helpful mental models that describe how we make decisions. One way to think about the decision making process is to determine where you are on the Maximizer versus Satisficer continuum. Knowing where you are on the continuum provides helpful, and sometimes transformative, decision […]