Build a Business, Not a Job

Business Advice: 5 Ways Your P&L Lies (and why it might cause your business to fail)

“David,” Tina said [actual business coaching client, but not her real name], “We’re really struggling to meet our payables this month but we have over $700,000 in profit year-to-date, how can this be happening to us? This is not something we’ve experienced before. Do you have any business advice?” That’s when I had to share […]

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The 5 Biggest Risks of Scaling Your Business

Which of these 5 potentially fatal scaling mistakes is your company making?

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The 10 Most Essential Sales and Marketing Controls

If you’ve ever felt yourself scrambling to oversee your sales or marketing efforts and team, here are 10 must have “controls” to put you back in the driver’s seat…

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Escaping the Feast or Famine Cycle: How to Get Your Service Business Past this Recurring Plateau and on the Path to Truly Scale

Don ran a successful engineering firm with revenues of roughly $1 million annually. But he had been stuck at this level for over a decade. “David,” he said, “We go out and respond to RFPs and take past clients out to lunch to reconnect, which generates a ton of new business for us. But then […]

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7 Ways to Shape Your Company Culture

Following up on my earlier article on five concrete steps to begin to create your company culture, here are seven simple ways to reinforce and build the company culture you want. 1. Get clear on your goals and priorities. Your company culture needs to absorb what you consider most important – your company’s priorities and […]

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Five Concrete Steps to Lay the Foundation for Your Business Culture

I’ve been starting and scaling companies for 20 years now. And over that time I’ve coached hundreds of entrepreneurs to successfully scale their companies too. I believe strongly in well-designed processes and replicable business systems. But what happens when someone on your team faces a novel situation that just isn’t “covered” in the systems that […]

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The Six Direct Response Marketing Secrets Every Marketer Must Know

Here is a short list of time-tested, market-validated marketing principles you must know to effectively grow your company…

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7 Tactics to Guaranteed to Increase Your Conversion Rate

Follow these 7 simple sales strategies and increase your company’s closing rate…

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8 Strategies To Leverage Your Competition to Grow Your Company

Sometimes your competition can be a great ingredient to help you grow. Here are 8 proven strategies to leverage your competition to help you grow faster…

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Business Coach Tip: 7 Simple Steps to Escape the Competency Trap and Free Up Your Time

Here is a simple 7-step game plan to escape the Competency Trap and build an organization that is stronger, more scalable, and less reliant on you…

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5 Concrete Sales Strategies to Immediately Increase Conversion

Here are 5 concrete strategies guaranteed to give you an immediate boost to your income. 1. Up Front Agreement An up front agreement is a formal or informal oral contract that you and your prospect both agree in which you both agree to give each other a clear decision – yes or no – whether […]

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Ask The Business Coach: 10 Techniques to Combat Customer Attrition

Here are 10 tips to retain more of the customers you bring in so that you can increase your profitability.

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7 Tips to Lower Your Outstanding Receivables and Collect More of What You’re Owed!

Charlene (name changed) was an attorney with a sterling reputation as a business attorney in Chicago. She was also struggling with cash flow challenges, which is what had prompted her to hire my company as her business coach. It was Charlene, one associate attorney, and one paralegal, and collectively they were billing roughly $600,000 per […]

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What’s Your Exit Strategy?

Which of these three exit strategies is right for you and your company? Tom had spent years working 80-hour weeks to grow his company. It started as an innocent hobby, just buying and selling used electronic parts online out of his house. He loved the challenge of finding a pallet of used parts at a […]

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12 tips to build your leadership team

To sustainably scale your company without sacrificing your life you need to grow, groom, and empower your leadership. Here’s exactly how to do it…

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The Secret to Scaling a Professional Services Firm

Here is the real secret to scale your expertise so that you can improve your consistency, speed up your delivery, lower your costs, and increase your profitability…

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The 6 steps to build out your expert system

Access a powerful 6-step template to map out your core expertise to make your company more profitable, stable, and profitable.

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Scalable Solutions – Making Choices that Can Scale

As the leader of a growing company you’ve got to make smarter choices that you know will scale, here’s why…

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23 Tips to Reduce Your Biggest Business Expenses

Here are 23 ways to reduce your five biggest company expenses so that you increase your profit margins.

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9 Tips on Saving Money with Your Staff That Aren’t Taught in Business School

Forget what the textbooks tell you. Here are 9 tips guaranteed to save you money with your staff straight from one of the nation’s leading business experts.

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22 Simple Tactics to Increase Profitability

We all have our reasons why we started the companies we did. For some it was a higher social purpose, for others it was the challenge of creating something new, and for you it might have been a different reason altogether. One thing we all have in common is the need for our companies to […]

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5 Tips to Being an Effective CEO

Brian grew up in business. His dad, Ronnie, started the manufacturing firm, his mom, Marge, ran much of the administrative and financial aspects of the company, and family life revolved around the company. Brian studied engineering and earned his degree. After college he came back home and went to work for the family business, quickly […]

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10 Tips to Successfully Step Into the “Chairman’s” Role versus the CEO’s More Active Role

When I first started coaching Tom his business was stuck at the $5 million per year revenue marker. The biggest reason for that was that Tom had built his company around himself. He made the key decisions, he approved the daily work, he managed the staff. He used his team to leverage himself, but he […]

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The 6 major risks that keep a buyer of your company up at night

There are 6 major causes of risk for a potential buyer (see below). Your job is to do everything you can that mitigates these risks and enhances your company’s value. 6 Key Risks from a Buyer’s Perspective: 1. Management team: How talented are the managers? Will they stay? What happens if one or more leave? […]

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Why Any Business (even yours) Can Scale

Many business owners say that because they’re selling expertise that lives in their heads, they can’t scale their businesses. This is especially true of the professional practices we coach. These doctors, lawyers, and highly paid consultants say, “David, there’s no way we can scale. We can see how what you teach would apply to other […]

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8 Sales Controls to Protect Your Company as You Scale

Wayne, a business coaching of my company, complained about how much time his sales team took for him to manage each week. “David,” he lamented, “They just do the craziest things. They make prices concessions when they don’t have to. They promise our customers unrealistic delivery dates. They even make up things to say about […]

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Coherence – A Secret Ingredient to Aligning Goals, Priorities, Actions, and Attention

What if there was a magic concept that you could employ that would powerfully align your company’s goals, priorities, actions, and culture? In other words, your company would invest its best resources in alignment with its top goals. And each of your team would act daily in accordance with these priorities, letting these priorities and […]

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7 tips to get your team to keep its promises

Great businesses are built on teams that take full ownership of individual responsibilities. Too many businesses let people slide by partially doing things, and accepting excuses for delays and mistakes that could have been avoided. A culture of accountability is one of the most valuable institutional habits that your business can form, and for better […]

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The Secret to Why Building a Business Can Make You Wealthy

Have you ever wondered how the wealthiest people in the world originally built their fortunes? If you analyzed the Forbes 400 list of richest people in the United States, you’d find that more than 325 of them got on the list by applying a simple formula (or being the heir of someone who applied this […]

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12 tips to Leverage a Business Coach to Help You Scale Faster

All world-class athletes have an experienced coach to pull the very best performance from them – game in, game out. Their coach gives them an edge to prepare better, plan smarter, and execute more powerfully. What’s not as well known is that top business owners often also have a coach, in their case a “business […]

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The False Dilemma – Control or Chaos

Cheryl, a business coaching client, ran a $1.5 million per year glass company. She worked hard, typically 70 hours a week, and she was scared to death to empower her team to “own” functions and responsibilities within the business. “David,” she said, “I’ve tried that before. I delegated to my team and asked them to […]

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35 Business Controls Your Company Needs to Successfully Scale

Controls are the intelligent processes, procedures, and safeguards that protect your company from uninformed or inappropriate decisions or actions by any team member. When you build a business versus a job, you want your team to have the authority to get tasks done without running everything past you. You need them to exercise their judgment […]

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A Simple 5 Step Process to Create Your Company Culture and Build an Owner Independent Company

Finally a simple, no-nonsense, concrete template to build the culture you want and reduce your company’s reliance on you.

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Creating Your “Strategic Structure” to Make Smart Choices and Execute to Get Results

How do you consistently get your company to invest its time, talent, attention, and money on the right things in the face of so many demands and urgencies crying out for its resources? You lean heavily on the strategic structure you’ve built for your company. At its most basic form, your strategic structure is how […]

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10 Tips to Align Your Goals, Priorities, Actions, and Company Culture

What if there was a magic concept that you could employ that would powerfully align your goals, priorities, actions, and company culture? In other words, your company would invest its best resources in alignment with its top goals. And each of your team would act daily in accordance with these priorities, letting these priorities and […]

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4 Focuses to Help You Scale Your Manufacturing Business

Here are the top four focus areas you need to pay attention to now to successfully scale your manufacturing business.

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Business Tip of the Day: 16 Secrets to Be a Great Boss

Here are the top 16 secrets to being a great boss, one of your key first defenses to retaining your top talent.

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4 Strategies to Land a Whale and Double Your Business

Who is that one customer whom if you could land them, could double your company over 12-24 months? Here are 4 strategies to land that whale…

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Financial Pop Quiz: Do You Have the Financial Savvy to Run Your Company (Take this short quiz and find out)

Here is a simple 10-question quiz to see if you have the financial savvy to effectively run your company.

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5 Sales Secrets for Companies Who Are Scared of Sales

Here are five of the most important sales fundamentals for your company especially if your company is a little “sales phobic”.

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The 6 Steps to Redesign Your Core Systems to Make them Better, Cheaper, and Faster

A proven 6-step process to make your systems better, faster, cheaper, and more scalable.

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15 Secrets You Must Know When Selling Your Company

You never know when you might get an offer to purchase your company. Here are 15 tips to help you be better prepared to do the dance of selling your company.

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Gross Profit Margin: The Secret Financial Indicator Most Business Owners Ignore

It gives you deep insight to pricing… to production costs… and to profitability… and 9 out of 10 business owners don’t understand it and how to use it…

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21 Business Controls to Help You Let Go of More (and worry less)

Here are 21 concrete examples of business controls that can help you delegate more “ownership” of functions in your business without keeping you up at night.

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The 3 Most Deadly Mistakes When Delegating to Your Team

Which of these three mistakes keeps you trapped “controlling” your business operations…?

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Growing Your Business Without Sacrificing Your Health, Family, or Life to Do It

Learn why you don’t have to sacrifice your life to grow your business.

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A Secret 4-Step Process to Systematize Your Business Starting in as Little as 90 Days

If you’ve ever wondered how to start systematizing your business, here is a time tested 4-step process to get started in the next 90 days.

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5 Sure-Fire Ways to Increase Your Profitability

Here is a quick-list of my 5 favorite ways to increase your company’s profitability.

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Why It Is Possible to Scale Your Business

What if you’re the one holding your company back from growing? Take this quick check up to see if this common limiting belief is costing your company.

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The 5 Integrity Habits

Here are the 5 most essential habits every business leader must cultivate to inspire and positively impact his or her team. How do you stack up…

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You Do Have the Money to Scale (5 places to look to internally fund your growth)

Growth always sucks up cash. Here are 5 places to look to free up the internal cash to use to fund your growth.

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How “Tomorrow” Is Costing Your Business (and 5 ways to get started now)

If you’ve ever put off doing what you know is the right decision or strategy to grow your company, here’s what really was going on (and 5 tips to deal with it.)

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You DO Have the Time

You’re already working enough hours; you just need to carve out a small percentage of them to invest in higher order activities to help you scale your company.

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5 Simple Steps to Grow Your Company

Tom, owner of a $5 million per year company in Florida, sure his business was successful, generating $1 million per year in profit, but he was working 80 hours a week, missing his family, hurting his health, and damaging his marriage. Tom was torn between his desire to see his business succeed, and being present […]

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A Simple Formula to Know Which Business You Should Start

Not sure what business to start? Here is a surefire formula to pick the right business to start…

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Feed Your Winners; Starve Your Losers

Gain an immediate boost to your cash flow by deliberately redirecting your time, attention, and money from your lowest producing marketing to your best tactics. Here’s how…

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The First Step to Making the Time to Scale Your Business

If you feel overwhelmed and at a loss for making the time to grow your business, start here.

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How This One Decision Can Allow You to Scale

Is your stubborn insistence that your business will always “need” you trapping you inside your company?

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The S.C.A.L.E. Formula™ to Grow Your Company and Get Your Life Back

Tom, owner of a $5 million per year company in Florida, was burning out. Sure his business was successful, generating $1 million per year in profit, but he was working 80 hours a week, missing his family, hurting his health, and damaging his marriage. Tom was torn between his desire to see his business succeed, […]

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The Secret Ingredient to Making the Right Strategic Decision

When you have everything on the line your key strategic decisions matter greatly. Learn the secret ingredient to making the right strategic call in your company.

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