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How do you know most of your work matters? There are probably a few things that matter to produce the outcomes important to an organization. Most work is simply effort and cost and does not produce meaningful results. You can see this with the ridiculing of office politics and people
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When you are small, you can run and grow your business in your head. In the early days, it's hard to think that you play many different roles because you do different jobs yourself. You can be the salesperson, accountant, marketer, product development manager, HR administrator and many
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If you want to grow your business, you have to have good people to delegate functional work to. Otherwise, you become the bottleneck and risk making customers unhappy. Many years ago, I remember learning the lesson of delegation early while working an engineering project. I had a designer working on
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“It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other, generally very precise, reason.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness If you haven't read Taleb's book, he
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Every handoff in your business is a failure point. When one person is handling information and moving execution to the next step, often you can get things done without many mistakes or delays. When you have to hand off a lead, support call, requirements, or project task, it's
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I love dealmaking. I agree with Robert Ringer's observation about dealmaking: "There are no statistics to prove it, but after years of experience, I'm absolutely convinced that dealmaking is the highest-paid profession in the world." I think the creative pieces and bringing ambiguous, and
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At some point, there's nothing more to change or create. You know what to do and only dogged determination and repetition with accountability will work. This is the part of scaling that moves the ball inches at a time and is quite painful. Repeating what everyone has agreed
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IBM used to train their salespeople with the BANT method: Budget Authority Need Timing It's still an excellent framework to ensure you are selling to people that can say, "Yes!" However, that last item, "timing," is a big variable today. We work within much
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We live in an unprecedented time in history. It used to be hard to start something. You needed infrastructure, people, permission, etc. That was how the industrial economy worked. The mass forced us to push with enough weight of force behind us. But now, you can put the pieces together
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I try to mix things up and change the routes I drive, places I work, people I meet and even houses I live in. Constantly experimenting and finding what is possible or what may work keeps a certain freshness to how I can approach work or do deals. There'
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It is intriguing when you meet a new person, hear their backstory and discover how they contribute. At the end of the day, business is people. Life is people. We can get so wrapped up in our work and routines that we limit ourselves by not experiencing what is new.
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If there were a magic pill for getting more business, someone would have found it, shared it and everyone would be taking it. The truth is that there is no magic pill. Getting new customers is hard work and a continual moving target. You might be tempted to enlist the