It’s an uncomfortable question, but one that a successful business owner cannot be afraid to ask themselves: “What am I the worst at?!”  After reading the quintessential entrepreneur’s “business book” eMyth by Michael Gerber, it inspired this post. Identifying and isolating your biggest weakness is a crucial step in strengthening your overall value proposition—the thing that […]

No matter what your industry is—if there are human beings on any end of the transaction—you will always, always, always need to nail your customer service to succeed. I follow a set of three rules religiously to take question marks completely out of the equation, so that my clients can absolutely depend on me to do […]

Your “bench strength” is the value of the team behind you when you’re the one up at bat. For example, can you attend an industry conference and feel confident that your team will step up to manage the day-to-day while you’re away over a long weekend?  I want to talk about how to boost your […]

If you open your inbox, what email is sitting at the very bottom, glaring at you accusingly every time you log in? It is imperative for me to keep a clean inbox to ensure that nothing gets lost, nothing is forgotten, and none of my clients are disappointed due to sloppy administration. I strive to […]

There are a lot of people making a lot of money by teaching folks how to sell things on LinkedIn right now. You’ve probably seen an e-book or seminar for sale yourself. If you google “LinkedIn lead generation”, the first result (at the time of writing) is from LinkedIn themselves, and it takes you to […]

“Interruption Marketing” is a phrase that has started to creep onto my radar rather recently, relative to the years I’ve been in business. If you aren’t familiar with the term, that might be because you (along with most of the world) think of it as simply “marketing”. Traditionally, and ad or piece of marketing collateral […]

When QR codes went away, most marketers who chose to write about why said that they just stopped being cool. A few more insisted that they were never cool to begin with. But I think Gary Vaynerchuck had the right idea a year ago: we ruined them. Marketers jumped on it and taught the consumer […]

Have you ever seen the show “Undercover Boss”? They disguise the CEO of a big company, and send him into the field among staff who don’t recognize him as a ‘new hire’ for training. The CEO gets to see what the operations on the ground are really like, instead of the rosy or distorted picture […]

I’ve been hearing this term—neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP—floating around for ages. It seems to keep popping up in marketing and business seminars, blogs, and “once in a lifetime” training opportunities that the internet keeps trying to sell me. Supposedly, Neuro-Linguistic Programming can help you market better and succeed personally by “programming” the behavior of yourself […]

Why should your customer buy from you rather than your competitor? The answer to that question is your “competitive advantage”. The product specs, the pricing options, the user friendly interfaces, the service quality, the whatever-it-is that convinces folks to buy from you when they’re in the market for what you’ve got. You might be shocked, […]

by Monique de Maio If you’re running a small business, you need talent just as badly as the big guys do—but you don’t need thousands of dollars in operating costs. You don’t have a dedicated HR team to handle payroll and benefits packages; you don’t have an aggressively air-conditioned office in a high rise; you […]

by Monique de Maio I had a big win the other day. The contract was enough all by itself to keep me busy for a few months. As soon as the deal was locked up, I breathed a big sigh of relief, I did a little happy dance at my desk—and started planning how to […]