I’m sure you’ve read articles about the importance of “culture” to shape the behaviors of your employees. One of my favorite descriptions of company culture was as “the invisible hand that shapes team behavior when there is no defined process or system to tell them what to do.” But understanding the concept of culture doesn’t […]
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How to Increase Productivity What’s Your Biggest Time Waster at Work? What is your biggest productivity killer at work? Is it: A. Phone calls? B. Meetings? C. Email? D. Staff interruptions? If you are anything like the 353 U.S. business owners my company Maui Mastermind surveyed you’re likely answer is “email” (57%), followed by either […]
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A recent article in the Harvard Business Review reported on an international study by the Center for Creative Leadership titled, Always On, Never Done?, which shows that professionals, executives and business owners in the U.S. and 36 other countries now work a whopping 72-hour week. The study went into depth explaining that one of the […]
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The world today is different in many ways, one key way is how the most successful business leaders have learned to break the chain between one hour of time worked and one unit of value created. Time cards and grueling days don’t help business leaders create value. We create value by what we do with […]
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Leading your company is never easy. A key function is for you to craft a clear strategy and map for the coming year. Here are my top 7 strategic planning suggestions to help you start your year off in the most powerful and profitable way possible. 1. Clarify the business you are trying to build. […]
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In my last article on the power of your written trail to protect yourself and your company I shared the two key “filters” you need to pass your written paper trail through. I want to share more details on the nuts and bolts of documenting your business deals and relationships so that you see it […]
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I wanted to follow up on an earlier article on the ten stupidest things business people do that get them sued with a simple practice that will help keep you safer – documenting your files. In the old world this often meant crafting “cover yourself” memos for your physical files, but in today’s world this […]
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“David, you’re never satisfied with the work I do. It’s just like with my dad, you’re never happy.” Those were the words I heard from a key team member 7 years ago now, and they stung. I wanted to be an enlightened boss and saw myself as an empowering leader. But here was direct evidence […]
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Over twenty years now I’ve been coaching business owners on the value of building a systems driven company. But what about those situations that your staff finds themselves in for which there isn’t a clear system to lay out how best to handle it? This is where your company culture comes in. Your company culture […]
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I was talking with Jim, owner of a $50 million per year boutique private equity company that we coach about the coming year. As we clarified the most important initiatives and goals for his company this year what became clear to me was that every company needed to go through this same clarifying and focusing […]
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In a recent business owner survey we conducted with several thousand of our business owner clients it became very clear that email had eclipsed phone calls and meetings as the single biggest time distraction in business. It’s addictive; it’s never ending; and it’s overwhelming. Here are our top 10 e-mail best practices we think every […]
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Leadership Training: One of our biggest responsibilities as a leader of a company is to help intentionally shape our company culture. Your leadership habits have an oversize impact on the culture you’re creating. Your team watches everything you do. Even when you think no one is looking, everyone is. Here are 7 leadership habits that […]
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Which of these 10 all-to-common things are you are your staff unintentionally doing that is putting your company at risk of getting sued…
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Are you a “micromanager”? An “abdicator”? Learn how to spot your management style and how to help your team produce more.
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Here’s a simple yet powerful strategy to create a compelling process to lead greater numbers of prospective customers into deeper, richer relationships with your company.
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“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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Which of these 5 potentially fatal scaling mistakes is your company making?
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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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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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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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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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Here is a short list of time-tested, market-validated marketing principles you must know to effectively grow your company…
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Follow these 7 simple sales strategies and increase your company’s closing rate…
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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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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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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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Here are 10 tips to retain more of the customers you bring in so that you can increase your profitability.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Here are 23 ways to reduce your five biggest company expenses so that you increase your profit margins.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Here are the top four focus areas you need to pay attention to now to successfully scale your manufacturing business.
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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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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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Here is a simple 10-question quiz to see if you have the financial savvy to effectively run your company.
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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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A proven 6-step process to make your systems better, faster, cheaper, and more scalable.
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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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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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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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Which of these three mistakes keeps you trapped “controlling” your business operations…?
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