Entrepreneurship Tips

With unemployment levels high today, many people are focusing on specific industry and domain experience with the idea that a large pool of candidates means they can write a very detailed list of experience and still get good candidates. This tends to create a process that ignores the overall quality and ability of the candidates in favor of a simple checklist of very specific experience. A person's broad experience, attitude, abilities, intelligence, work ethic, and other factors are much more important by a factor of ten for most managers and senior executives. The truth is that a high-quality executive can...

The Bigger Picture Annual Planning Process Hopefully, you have already read my article or book chapter on Management By Objective and learned about managing individuals and departments to monthly goals. If you have not it is recommended, but not required, to understand this piece. This chapter is really the next level “up” in terms of developing a more strategic annual plan.  It is no so much about deciding where the business will go; that should be part of the vision process and already known. It is about setting the milestones to be achieved in a particular year.  I recommend a simple and...

Adjusting Your Management Style To Your Company's Stage, A miniseries on practical leadership focus for start-ups and emerging growth company senior executives. This series will explore how leadership focus and skills must evolve as a company grows from a raw startup to an expansion stage, successful enterprise.  Most seminars, texts, and articles talk about leadership generically as if it had the same requirements in all situations. It does not, and in fact, the key elements of success at each stage of a company's development are always very different. Leadership is a skill that is hard to develop, but usually easy...

Strategic Planning - Not Just For Fortune 2000 Companies Generally, if you have more than about a dozen people in your company, you need to have an annual strategic planning process.  With a small management team of three or four people, it is not very difficult, and will likely go quickly because you discuss these things daily.  The trick is to look at the longer-term (at least a year out, preferably three years) in the context of a 3 to 5 year vision for the company.  As the company gets bigger the time invested will get bigger too, but either...

Jay Abrams, an excellent marketing guru, and the speaker says there are only three ways to grow your business: 1) More customers, 2) Higher average sales/revenue per customer and 3) A higher purchase frequency from your customers. Although this is a great model to divide and attack the problem, it is more classified into categories of ways than actual ways to grow your company.  Luckily, we can come up with hundreds of ways to grow a business, and the tough part is deciding where to put your efforts.  One theory is that with ever-growing sales and marketing costs, it is usually...