Are you down with SOP’s? Some call em’ Standard Operating Procedures, I call them Playbooks. If you’re tired of putting out fires in your business, then you’ll need them to keep your sanity. Recently I had the privilege of having dinner w/ the Godfather of system design for entrepreneurs, Michael Gerber (author of The E-Myth / 10M copies sold). I
When I started in business I couldn’t sell to save my life. After two failed companies I decided to fix that. My solution? Driving around nights & weekends in my silver, 94’ Volkswagen Jetta listening to every sales audio book I could get my hands-on. Some nights, I had Ziglar riding shotgun. On other nights, it was Carnegie, Tracy or
Want to learn how I manage over 100 virtual assistants to manage all my work? Watch this week’s video. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Why the hell do you need 100 VA’s?”
If I asked you to name a credit card company that rhymes with latex…” Could you guess who I’m talking about? Yes? Got it? Good, so now you’ll understand the size of the company I was trying to sell to. The challenge with big companies is that they have all the time, resources and money in the world, so wasting
Did you know that Slideshare.net built their product in India? Automattic (creators of WordPress) – 2,000 people in a distributed team. Even GitHub (raised $250M+ in funding) has a global team of remote workers. The future of teams are distributed. Over my past 3 companies (Spheric, Flowtown, Clarity) and everything in between, I’ve always had world class team members work
Can you explain your business to someone who’s outside your industry? That’s been the benefit of having a father who has no clue what I’ve done for most of my career :). It’s also helped me learn how to explain my company’s benefits to a new customer. One way to do that in a scalable way is to use live
It was like writing your own bio, but 10x harder. This is the story of my logo. It started with a call to Gair. I was nervous. You see, he’s the guy I’ve called to help me uncover the visual identity of my last two companies. But this time things were different.
The other day my furnace stopped working. The issue is that my wife was trying to change the air filter. Why? Don’t ask (she just likes to do those kinds of things, and yes – I realize I’m the man of the house and I should be doing it, but I digress…) After Renee’s noble attempt at performing advanced furnace
How do you deal with shiny objects? I was asked this question this past week while giving a talk at one of my portfolio companies. It got me excited because I had a GREAT strategy to overcome it – more on that below. But first, a story…
In my early 20’s I was a workaholic. It took a toll on my health, my relationships and my business… … although I didn’t know it at the time. Even though the financial outcome of that work ethic resulted in the acquisition of my company Spheric at 28 years old… … I wouldn’t do it again. It was stupid.
