If you want to scale your business, your starting place should always be your business model. Why? Because your business model is the foundation for all scalability. Simply put, if your business model isn’t scalable, by definition, you can’t build a scalable business....
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Are You Dreaming Big Enough?
As you look at your plan for this year, how big is your dream? Does it excite you? Scare you? Or totally underwhelm you? If you’re like most business owners and entrepreneurs chances are your plans are closer to the underwhelm side than the excite side. Note: while...
read moreHow Thinking Like a Grandmaster Can Help You Grow Your Business This Year
As you’re starting to get ready to create your strategic plan for this coming year, wouldn’t you like to know how a great strategist would approach it? Or, wouldn’t it be nice to have some fresh new ideas about how to think about strategy as you head into your...
read moreAre You Building Something People Urgently Want (Or Not)?
Few things are more frustrating as a business owner and/or entrepreneur than getting ready to launch a new product and/or service … and hearing only crickets after its launch. What makes this experience even more frustrating than the lack of results/revenue is that we...
read moreWhy You Don’t Want Your Accountant Creating Your Strategic Plan
If you want to have the best possible chance of rapidly growing your business this year, then you don’t want to have your accountant leading your strategic planning process. Why? Not because I have anything against accountants. I happen to like them. In fact, my...
read more4 Questions to Enhance Your Strategic Decision-Making
Have you ever decided on an idea that you thought was a good idea at the time and then three, six or 12 months later thought, “What were we thinking?” That often happens to a lot of businesses because, in the middle of working on a strategic plan, very few leaders...
read moreHow to Deal With a 800 Pound Gorilla/Competitor
What do you do when you have a major competitor in your backyard? How do you respond to someone with a regional or national or global brand? Or, what do you do when you’re competing against someone who has more money, more marketing, and more boots on the...
read moreThe Six Key Areas of Executive Attention
As a leader, you know that as your business grows, you keep bumping up against ceilings of capacity where what your business needs from you is beyond your current capacity level. And, that’s a problem because as you’ve heard me say before, “No...
read moreWhat Assumptions Are Hindering Your Growth?
Assumptions. You have them. I have them. We all have them. Some are helpful (the sun will come out tomorrow :-). Some are irrelevant (I bet Joe will wear his Redskins jersey to work tomorrow). But some are deadly and clear impediments to the growth of your business....
read moreIs It Time to Narrow or Switch Your Target Market?
One of the best parts of strategic planning/thinking is that it allows you to break from the past. Strategy work isn’t mired down with “what was” or “what has been,” it’s anchored to “what could be” or “what...
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