Grow Your Business Newsletter

I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with buyers looking at businesses to acquire. The buyers hire us to review the business they are acquiring to make sure everything stacks up and is what the seller is reporting. As part of the process, we always look at how much the business is worth based…

Clear communication. That’s it. You can stop reading now. 🙂  I mean, there really isn’t anything more to it, but of course, those two little words encompass a whole lot. I’ve been managing people since I was twenty one and I still can get this wrong. It’s not that I don’t know how important it…

I was probably lucky in my entrepreneurial journey that the first business I ever was part of launching was an investor backed startup. I was in the MBA program at SDSU, and in my second year, I got an internship to work with two experienced business owners who wanted to launch a new business. This…

As a business owner, you are constantly being pulled in different directions. It comes with the territory- everyone wants a piece of your time. The problem is not all demands are created equal (see my recent article on the 80/20 rule!), and if you just spent your time doing things other people asked you to…

One of the most overlooked ways to make your business bigger is by making your business smaller. The usual reaction to that is No, I don’t think so, not for my business. And I get it- the natural reaction of the small business owner is to take everything that comes in and then afterwards figure…

The 80/20 Rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, states that roughly 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. In business, this concept is powerful for identifying what activities, customers, or products yield the greatest results. The problem is, it’s easy to forget and easy to ignore. When we make a to-do list, we…

I assume you know what Shark Tank is, but just in case you don’t own a TV or hate reality television, let me briefly explain. In this show, entrepreneurs present their business briefly to five experienced investors in the hopes of getting an investment and the investors pepper the business owners with questions about why…

The first job I had out of college was as an assistant restaurant manager. I was twenty one at the time and had never managed anyone. I got pretty thorough training in all the aspects of running the restaurant- I spent time at each of the three kitchen stations and doing all the front of…

There are lots of reasons that having a more profitable business is better than having one that operates on low margins or even razor-thin ones. The first, of course, is that you just make more money for each dollar in sales you add. Like I said, pretty freakin’ obvious. The follow on benefits to that…