Being a great boss is one of the most difficult parts of being a business owner. You have a brilliant idea, the vision to scale and the know-how to make it all happen. You put together a rock star team, and you are working towards building a solid foundation for your business. And then the […]
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Here at Maui Mastermind, we have coached thousands of business owners over the past decade. We have seen small businesses blossom and grow into owner-independent companies. We have seen business owners scale their businesses and sell them for more money than they ever thought possible, and we have watched executives climb the ladder faster than […]
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When it comes to marketing, having a solid emotional appeal to your brand is critical to your success. But what exactly is an “emotional appeal”, David? Your brand is simply the emotional associations and gut level “sense” of how your company, product, or service is intuitively perceived by your market. The easiest way to make branding real […]
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Do you suffer from BADD (Business Attention Deficit Disorder)? BADD (Business Attention Deficit Disorder) affects millions of business owners each and every year. Symptoms include: excitability, difficulty focusing, lack of systems and controls, inability to delegate tasks, lack of restraint, or persistent repetition of actions with no progress. This common ailment has been known […]
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Employers have had it good for way too long. Back in the old days, you would put together a written outline of the ideal candidate, compose the perfect job post and then wait for the resumes to roll in. You would then schedule interviews and make your selection based on your selected criteria. Then you […]
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Deciding to sell your business is a big decision and one that you don’t make very often. You weigh the pros and cons of your exit strategy, read all the articles and books on the secrets to selling your business and you begin to take a good hard look at your own business processes and […]
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Think that you have what it takes to be a good leader? Try teaching a 10 year old how to make macaroni and cheese from scratch. This one activity will give you insight into your own leadership skills (and weaknesses) and help you build a stronger, more profitable business. No One Is Born A Chef My son was eager […]
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If you know your way around a negotiation table, there is no stopping you. You can negotiate for better prices with your vendors, new hire and existing salaries, contracts with sales prospects and long-term clients and lower overhead costs in general, leading to higher profit margins and more capital to scale your business. Natural Born […]
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There are three levels of building a company. Level One: A “Start-Up” Business. You’ve got no real control yet, nor freedom. Level Two: An “Owner Reliant” Business. You’re a full-time business owner whose business is working – as long as you do. Now you have control, but with that control comes long hours and the sense […]
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You will never forget your first love, i.e., the startup phase. Everything was new and exciting, and you swore you’d passionately give your best to your business. But as time went by, you likely found yourself feeling burned out by the long hours and recurring staff or customer fires you dealt with on a daily basis. So much drama, and […]
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Women business owners make up approximately 20% of the executive workforce pool. They make less than their male counterparts and are far less likely to receive funding for their business or startup. So, how in the world could you think that women have it easier in business, David? Over the years, I have had the […]
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There is nothing in the world that compares to a great mastermind session. You walk in the door tired and weary from the day to day toll of running your business. You have more problems than solutions and you feel like you are the only one in the world struggling to make it all work. […]
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How long it takes you to respond to an email has a direct correlation with the health of your business. Keep reading to find out how you measure up. In my business coaching company Maui Mastermind, we send out millions of emails each year to our current and prospective clients. Understandably, there is always a […]
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Tired of working longer hours with no increase in revenue? Try these 5 simple things that you can do today to increase your bottom line. I recently shared with you my top 5 Ways to Increase Your Profits, and the response was very positive. So much in fact, that I would like to share you […]
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Every sales person thinks the sale is made in the final move of their sales visit, but their wrong. Top sales pros all know that it’s the way you frame your sales appointment up front that makes or breaks your ability to close. I first learned this from one of my early sales mentors who […]
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Tired of getting useless team feedback? Or not getting team feedback at all? This super-simple tool will change everything. Part of being a successful business leader is to make sure you extract maximum learning out of your week, month, and quarter. In this article, I’d like to share with you the easiest, most effective way […]
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Does your company retain talent? Do your employees love and adore their jobs? If not, all you need to do is this one little thing. Over the last twenty-five years, I’ve known and coached thousands of business owners. And if I were to make one categorical observation about us as a group – about the […]
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Intimidated by negotiations? Focus on these five simple negotiation skills first and get much better. Think of all the times in your business week you negotiate: with new hires and existing employees; with sales prospects and long-term clients; with vendors and suppliers. If you’re a business owner or leader, you need to know how to […]
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Are your systems as powerful as they can be? Does your staff appreciate their value? Is system-building eating up your time? These 4 advanced tactics will change all that. Over the past twenty-five years, my company, Maui Mastermind, has been coaching business owners on how they can build businesses instead of jobs. At the core […]
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Do you feel like your staff comes to you to solve problems and put out fires they should be able to handle themselves? Here are 8 simple steps to train your employees to actually “own” their own job and free up your time… (Which of these principles of effective leadership are you ignoring?) Wouldn’t it be […]
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Tired of doing your assistant’s job for them? You should take a moment to think about the four kinds of personal assistants and which one is right for you. (Hint: You need to avoid two of them!) Are you hiring personal assistants who save you time or who cost you time? Recently, I invited thirty-five […]
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Are your systems as powerful as they can be? Does your staff appreciate their value? Is system-building eating up your time? These 4 advanced tactics will change all that. Over the past twenty-five years, my company, Maui Mastermind, has been coaching business owners on how they can build businesses instead of jobs. At the core […]
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Here are three simple yet incredibly effective secrets to flip the table on your direct reports and get them to manage themselves! The whole point of hiring staff is that they’re supposed to be free up your time. But what happens when you end up spending the same amount of time or more managing the […]
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Intimidated by negotiations? Focus on these five simple negotiation skills first and get much better. Think of all the times in your business week you negotiate: with new hires and existing employees; with sales prospects and long-term clients; with vendors and suppliers. If you’re a business owner or leader, you need to know how to negotiate. […]
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It’s called ‘deliberate practice’ and it’s a proven way for your staff to master a new skill in a fraction of the time In this article, I’m going to share the most effective learning process you can use in your coaching career that will help improve your key team members’ performance. Not only is this […]
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Employee coaching is critical so you can start scaling your business and taking initiative. Here are five simple steps to get that and more… How do you best develop the talent of your current team? How do you groom a direct report to take on new responsibilities? How do you grow your employees so that […]
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Having a 1-page quarterly rolling action plan is a powerful tool for growing your company, just so long as you sidestep these three pitfalls. As important as it is to have a big picture vision for how you plan to grow and scale your business, it’s equally important to bring that broader vision back to […]
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Which of these time thieves is stealing 21.8 hours a week of your working day? In early 2017, my business coaching firm launched a comprehensive study on time management. We interviewed and surveyed small business owners and their key executives in order to learn how they spend their time and, particularly, where their time gets […]
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As a business coach, I’m always looking for new strategies to help people and businesses become more effective and more efficient. Usually, I focus on things like leadership and marketing tactics. But, in this article, I want to tell you about a productivity app called Evernote that’s helped me radically reinvent the way I work. […]
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I’ve been coaching business owners for more than twenty years, helping business owners grow their companies and at the same time, reducing their companies’ reliance on them. When it comes to scaling their businesses, one of the biggest challenges that I see business leaders struggle with is delegation techniques. When you’re delegating, it’s often hard […]
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Mastermind groups can help you grow both your business and yourself. But when a group settles into a routine, it can sometimes lose its effectiveness. That’s why I want to share five ways that you can breathe new life into your mastermind group. Napoleon Hill introduced the idea of the mastermind group back in 1937 […]
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Think about how much money you spend on marketing. Then think about your current conversion rate. Maybe you’re converting 3 percent of leads? Or 12 percent? Now imagine that you could use a simple technique increase your conversion rate by 10 to 25 percent. Wouldn’t you want to do that? Of course you would. The […]
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Delegation grows businesses. It empowers teams to take on more responsibilities and deliver results. In fact, the best leaders are those that train their teams to function without them. Having worked with thousands of business coaching clients, I can say with certainty that the mark of great leadership is the ability to delegate. Nearly all […]
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Do you find yourself wishing you had more time to focus on the important stuff and grow your business? If so, you’re not alone. One of the most common concerns among business owners is that there just aren’t enough hours in the week to grow your business. But, I promise you: There really are. Here […]
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Here’s a 3-step small business hack to improve internal and customer facing processes and boost your company’s efficiency fast!
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You already spend thousands with suppliers and vendors every month. Why not learn how to get the best pricing with these negotiation secrets?These three ridiculously easy questions will save you 5 to 15 percent or more on every purchase or contract.
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Tired of turnover and bad hires? Here’s a simple 4-step system to know in advance if you’re about to make a terrible mistake (and how to make a much better hiring selection).
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Have you ever wondered how the world’s top entrepreneurs get so much done in their days? After all, they have the same 24 hour days and 7 day weeks, yet they consistently get so much more done in that time. I was recently talking with a friend who owns and still runs a $155 million […]
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As we enter into the final half of the year, headlines are going to popping up about how online giants like Amazon.com and others expect to increase online sales by billions of dollars. Here are five powerful tips we share with our business coaching clients to increase website conversion that they consistently use that allow them to maximize their sales conversion rates. Follow these best practices and see your sales quickly increase.
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Most of our professional service coaching clients come to us with an operating profit margins of 25-40 percent. This means that out of every dollar of revenue, 25-40 cents drops to their bottom line as pre-tax profits. I want to share with you a simple strategy that one law firm I work with used to […]
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With Uber and Google’s workplace diversity issues sparking headlines across the country this year, I wanted to share three things that will make a difference. To be clear, none of these things are quick fixes. All three of these ideas are designed to help create a company culture that is diverse and empowered. This can […]
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The response was so strong from the article I posted last week of 15 email marketing insider tips that I wanted to share nine more with you in this article. Considering that my company Maui Mastermind sends out millions of targeted emails every month to our subscriber elist for our business coaching services, we’ve learned […]
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It’s an exciting time, as start-up culture has taken the business world by storm over the last ten years. People are eager to bring their visions to life and dream that “their” idea is the “next big thing”, and that it’s the “new and improved” Facebook or Airbnb. Because there are so many new start-ups launching every day, the competition for start-up capital is tight.
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Make your emails valuable. This can be a key insight, a touching story, a special offer, or anything else that is relevant to your business and your audience. What do you talk with your prospects and customers about when you’re with them in person? What do they care about? How do you touch their lives? This is the core of your email messaging.
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The bottom line is that you need to think about scaling as you run and operate your business. In many ways, you build a scalable company through the cumulative impact of hundreds of small decisions through time.
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One advantage of working with hundreds of business coaching clients is that we get to see which “levers” in a business are the easiest to quickly impact profitability. Here are my three favorite “profit levers” for you to adjust to increase your company’s operating profit margin. One: Raise Your Prices I know you may be […]
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Earlier today I was leading a web cam round table with a dozen of our top one-on-one business coaching clients. The subject was leadership. During a portion of this round table the participants were sharing how they were personally using a simple delegation technique we had taught them called the “Capability Spectrum”. Imagine a scale from […]
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Cold calling just may be the most commonly overlooked powerhouse for you to grow your business. Here are 7 cold calling secrets to help you do it the right way and generate rapid, stable sales you would otherwise miss out on. If there were any one sales generating activity that applies to a large cross […]
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Let’s start with the plain truth – it’s hard to find great talent. And every hire is a gamble of tens of thousands of dollars or more which you lay on the line hoping that the person you hire lives up to even most of your hopes from the selection process. I was recently giving […]
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Here is the hidden sales process step that most sales people miss, many times costing them the sale when their buyer gets cold feet. You’ve likely had this experience. You just closed the deal. You and your team are sharing hi-fives around the office. You’re mentally counting your profit on the deal and the thrill […]
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Here’s a simple method to regain control of your cash flow (and why your P&L “profit” is often a misleading indicator of your cash position). I was giving a keynote address to a group of medical practice business owners when one of the people in the room came up to me after and shared about […]
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Here is a simple game plan to create a marketing funnel that works. I was talking with a business coaching client who runs a $10 million a year professional service firm. He shared with me that it had taken him several monthly to build out his core marketing funnel for a new service he started […]
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Here are 4 simple ways to quickly increase your sales revenue perfect for any professional services firm. “David,” my client asked, “How do we increase of volume? We’ve been struggling ever since we lost that one big account.” This is such a common situation for a professional services firm to deal with – a painful […]
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Here’s a clear list of 10 proven time-tactics guaranteed to double your productivity… Do you find yourself complaining about your consistent lack of time? Here are 10 proven time-tactics guaranteed to double your productivity. In fact, you put even five of these time tactics to work and you’ll find yourself breaking through to a new […]
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Does your business suffer from this all too common cause of loss of business volume? If so, here’s what you can do about it… It’s a common pattern I see catch even the smartest entrepreneurs off guard. After a long period of successful growth they notice that their lead flow and prospect pipeline has dried […]
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Want to know if you’re really growing as a business leader? Then here are the five in-your-face questions you must ask yourself. Be ruthlessly honest in your answers. Your insights will help you accelerate your growth as a business leader and the success you enjoy. 1. Are you doing less things, but the less that […]
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Recently I was invited to give a keynote address at a large industry conference of business owners on the east coast. The organizer wanted me to share what I thought were the most essential principles that would make any entrepreneurial venture successful. Reflecting back on the thousands of business owners I’ve coached, and the companies […]
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Think for a moment about how much money you spend on digital and print ads. If you’re like many of our business coaching clients your ad spend may total up to 10 percent of revenue. Yet what if you’re wasting a massive portion of that money? Here is a simple principle that is guaranteed to […]
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Struggling to get your sales team to consistently do the key sales behaviors you need them to do? Here is one sales metric you must measure and track over time… I was talking with Tony about his benefits consulting company when he shared his biggest struggle. (Disclosure: Tony was a former business coaching client for […]
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Here is that tool – I call it the Sweet Spot Analysis™ Tool. We developed this tool to help our business coaching clients have a simple way to determine the very best ideas that they could implement each quarter to grow their businesses in the face of too much to do and not enough time in which to get it all done.
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