Business Genius

Never be afraid to talk to your customers about pricing. They are the only reliable source for learning for certain what your value is to them. If you’ve over-priced your products and services, you likely won’t make enough sales to stay in business. And, if you’ve under-priced them, you’re short-changing yourself. Neither situation is a fair outcome for the effort invested in creating your products and services in the first place. Once you've landed a customer, the next step is increasing the perceived value of what was purchased.

We’re all familiar with the traditional measure of business success being s/he who makes the most sales in a given timeframe wins. But digital marketing means to sell to one person who needs or wants what you offer, you interrupt hundreds of others who don’t. Here's what to do instead.

When starting out as a coach or consultant it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that offering a free 1:1 call with leads for your programs or services helps you build a thriving practice fast. But, nothing could be further from the truth!

Is your business at risk for an Entrepreneurial Backslide? That’s what happens when small service businesses actually take home less money as they grow. When your business starts succumbing to an entrepreneurial backslide your revenue may continue to increase, but that is a fatal illusion because your take home will continue to decrease.

Saying yes to new opportunities is scary! Even when you’ve been chasing them for months! Chasing opportunities and acting on them when they are within your grasp are two very different things. When saying yes scares you, Josh Spector reminds us to remember these 5 things.

If you’re not sure how to best respond to pricing objections, don’t worry. I’ve got some suggestions for you today. Enjoy.

Last week I shared Josh Spector’s list of the 5 most valuable skills you can learn posted in his newsletter For the Interested. For each skill, he had great suggestions for how you can improve it through practice and that’s what we’ll talk about today.

The 5 most valuable skills you can have in life and work aren’t taught in school, don’t show up on your resume, and are consistently overlooked and underappreciated. The good news? It costs you nothing to develop them and you should pursue every opportunity to do so.

A strategic business partnership that isn’t working is a lot like a marriage that’s so done it’s just not recoverable. And just like in a failed marriage, at some point, you simply have to make the decision to not be the victim of circumstances any longer. Instead, you must take command of the situation and make a move to position yourself and your business for a better future.

If you stay in business long enough, the day will come when you must confront the harsh reality of employee or client betrayal. You won’t want to believe it’s true, but the facts speak for themselves: a person you trusted and gave your best to is stealing your hard work, creative ideas, time and energy by engaging in bad behavior. Getting caught isn’t what makes something wrong.

Lawsuits are costly and require a lot of time, energy and money to prepare. It’s a slow process. Even more costly if you lose. There’s more at stake than meets the eye. I sincerely hope you are running your business in a way that makes it unlikely you’ll every have to deal with such a thing. However, as you might one day discover, personal integrity is not what it used to be. And when you are in business, sometimes a lawsuit cannot be avoided no matter what safeguards you’ve put in place.

The coming of a new year tends to bring a renewed focus on one’s goals. Many business owners have trouble defining goals with enough precision to execute them effectively. Then they are subsequently paralyzed by conflicts between their need to create new work and launch it quickly while being strategic enough to consider what work is even worth creating and launching in the first place. All too often this leads to doing whatever work is easiest for the dopamine hit rather than tackling the harder work with the potential to have the greatest positive impact on your business. If you’ve taken a look at your last year and know you failed to hit important goals, chances are you’re making one or more of three mistakes in your goal setting right out of the gate.

No one starts a business wanting it to fail, yet many do. There are very predictable reasons for why so many startups fail and we’re taking a hard look at the top 5 today.

Most entrepreneurs have taken many risks to get to where they are today. But taking risks does not mean going in blindly and expecting to come out the other side unscathed. Today we’re talking about why entrepreneurs need to takes risks and the types of risks you’ll need to get comfortable with as a business owner and how to mitigate them.

Without revenue, your business has no future. Here are 5 common revenue-related-stress scenarios and what you can do about them. Because stress can kill you. Not just your business. You.

Planning brings the future to the present so you can do the right things now. Too many businesses are started without having any kind of business plan in place. Unless the banks or potential investors want to see a plan, there is absolutely no plan – there is only a dream or big idea put in motion. And that’s why, for so many, years later there’s been a lot of spending and very little (if any) revenue to show for it. Here are 3 easy ways you can instantly change that!

Sometimes the darkness is your candle. Having the best strategies for building your business in place means nothing when the black dog of depression steals your motivation. The lack of motivation resulting from depression (and other mental illnesses or psychological injuries) can be debilitating for you and devastating for your business. But, it doesn’t have to be that way! Here's how to keep getting things done!

If you’ve been trying to build your business by attracting an audience of fans and followers in social media, I have some bad news for you. Building an audience in social media is a waste of time. You don’t need more fans and followers to grow your business; you need to attract buyers. There are critical differences between these two groups of people. Let’s run through that list now so you can give yourself a better chance of attracting the buyers you need by knowing how to inspire them to want to do business with you.

How you start something is how you finish it. Whether you are selling a product or a service, each new customer undergoes an on-boarding experience as they transition into working with or using what you sold them after the sale. As the business owner, you are responsible for creating that experience in a way that leaves them thrilled with the decision to buy from you and not one of your competitors.

Sometimes the darkness is your candle. Having the best strategies for building your business in place means nothing when the black dog of depression steals your motivation. The lack of motivation resulting from depression (and other mental illnesses or psychological injuries) can be debilitating for you and devastating for your business. But, it doesn’t have to be that way! Here's how to keep going ...