Recently I was invited to give a keynote address at a large industry conference 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 they owned, I…
Recently I was working on a tool to help our coaching team internalize the best practices we’ve developed to handle the most common business challenges. While the document I eventually created dealt with 12 key challenges, here is a summary of four that I’ve observed are most common to small businesses we coach ($1-25 million…
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…
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 three years.) “David, how do I get my sales people to spend more time in the field actually selling?” I understood Tony’s frustration. He knew that the success of his…
Thomas owned a successful manufacturing business in northern California. He was an experienced business owner who recognized he needed help to take off many of the lower level administrative details off his plate that were distracting him from the higher value work he needed to get down. Here is the same 5-step process we suggested…
Years ago one of my business mentors Roy shared with me on a rafting trip how time away from his business was one of the key tactics that helped him scale it. Over the past 20 years as an entrepreneur scaling companies has taught me that a business owner can cast a pretty big shadow…
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 a keynote…
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 of the new customer you’ve brought on… then you get that email canceling the deal. What happened? You likely missed a key step in…
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 his cash flow challenges. His practice was generating just shy of $3 million dollars a year in revenue, but he felt anxious because he never…
I just returned from a large business conference my company, Maui Mastermind, hosted in Florida. One of the most important themes we that came up in several of the question and answer periods was how could an entrepreneur, or any business executive for that matter, break the connection between hours worked and value created. As business…