Being in business isn’t hard. Sell something your customers need. Bring in more money than you send out.

Having a successful business is a lot harder. Being successful means you have to do everything that much better than your competition. You need a positioning that’s, unique, competitive and motivating. This is hard.

To be successful in business you need to understand what the category requires, you need to “sell something your customers want,” but this isn’t enough. Even if you do it very well, this won’t differentiate you, it won’t make your business the category leader, it won’t lead to high margins and growth.

It’s table stakes. [Read more...]

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Passive Aggresive BehaviorWe hear a lot about passive aggressive behavior. But what’s the opposite? If we don’t want to be passive aggressive, what behavior do we want to demonstrate?

We are coordinating a website build with, as often happens, multiple players. It’s a great team that is functioning quite smoothly except for a somewhat recalcitrant client. On a recent call a team member from the company that built the database provided some insight into managing this client. He told us that, in his experience, you need to help them along if you want things to get done and more importantly get done correctly. [Read more...]

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Plowing through emails I was once again reminded that the fine art of effective business writing is dieing. Rambling expositions on subjects and ideas without beginning or end. Effective business writing has impact.  Like writing effective presentations, it isn’t hard, you just need to follow a 5 step process. [Read more...]

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