When we sit down and talk with clients and prospects, many of whom come to us with statements like “I need a new website,” we always start by asking lots of questions. In my Vistage Group, we refer to this as “brilliant inquiry.” The idea is not to generate solutions but to more clearly define the […]
Tag: business consulting
Here’s a great idea about how you should present your business data to investors, prospects, or even just Mom: forget the billions. In a recent article, author and business plan expert Tim Berry explains that these numbers and this top-down approach just don’t mean anything to anyone. “As an investor, as a business plan contest […]
I often say that true authenticity– being exactly who you really are and nothing else– is one of the most important things you can do to help be successful in whatever you’re doing. When I saw this article from Business in Blue Jeans CEO Susan Baroncini-Moe talking about some of the issues people struggle with […]
Harvey Mackay, owner of Mackay Envelope, is widely known for his books and speaking engagements on sales. In his weekly column, he recalls the Broadway musical “My Fair Lady” to make a point: In the Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” Professor Higgins has driven his prodigy Eliza Doolittle to exhaustion teaching her how to speak […]
Underdogs win a lot more often than you think. Malcolm Gladwell explains how. We’re all familiar with the story of David and Goliath, where David stood before the giant of the Philistines and survived to tell about it. For forty days, Goliath had been dispensing soldiers with relative ease, until David came along. David rose […]
It’s been an interesting week. I had the opportunity to have a heart to heart with a friend and longtime client yesterday who asked for a little more… A little more attention, a little more time, a little more responsiveness. Our conversation reminded me how difficult it can be to manage growth and expectations at […]
“I now get as much satisfaction from the challenges of keeping my restaurant fresh and exciting as I did from cooking. It is now more than twice as busy as it was and growing at 20% a year–teeming daily with regulars and newcomers.” Jonathan Rapp There are enough gems in this short two-page article to […]
In a few days, we’ll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of starting Rare Bird. I woke up this morning with the words of Teddy Roosevelt on my mind, which I first encountered years ago in “The Norman Shield,” the pledge training manual of Sigma Chi. “It is not the critic who counts: not the man […]
Let’s see… we talked about about design, site architecture, implementation strategy, marketing strategy… We walked out of a client meeting the other day when Michael, one of our recently-acquired programmers asked me, “So, was that fairly typical of how these meetings go?” I ran through a mental checklist… let’s see, we talked about design, site […]
