I love to read and am rarely without a pile of books I’m working on. One of my favorites, which I found years ago in my sister’s room because she had been assigned the novel at school, is The Princess Bride. At first, I thought it probably wasn’t something I’d want to read (very much…
I find for most entrepreneurs I meet they feel it is very hard to stop having business ideas. Once you go down the road of deciding to do your own thing and see how making a business out of solving a problem can lead to a very rewarding business it is hard to then stop…
I have often said that I wouldn’t mind being rich but I’d never want to be famous. If I was someone who happened to love and excel at something that made me well known as a byproduct, I guess I’d still do it, but I’d spend any time I could away from the scrutiny and…
For most of my life, I’ve played sports. When I was young, I tried basketball and soccer because that’s what most kids played and I had no baseline to know what I liked or didn’t like. Turns out, I didn’t like either of those much, probably at least partly because I wasn’t very good at…
There are two general kinds of marketing a business can do. You can do brand building or you can do direct response. Brand building is what Coke does, what beer companies do, and what a lot of car companies do. They make expensive commercials whose only purpose is to remind you that they are out…
A lot of people think of small business and entrepreneurship as a highly risky venture. Everyone knows someone – maybe even someone in their family or circle of friends – who went into business and it didn’t work out. There are all kinds of stats floating around on the internet about how 1 in 5…
This is the time of year when a lot of people are trying out goals they set at the end of last year. Some may have already given up and others may be going strong. But usually, these goals are personal in nature and for some reason, most people don’t carry this idea over to…
Company culture is a term you hear thrown around a lot but usually in reference to larger businesses. The reality is though that every business has a culture even if there is only one person there. The culture is generally determined by the owner because they determine what the business is, how it operates, who…
Even though Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol nearly 200 years ago at this point, it’s pretty hard to not end up hearing about it every year around this time. In fact, this year our family went to see the play performed at the Old Globe Theatre here in San Diego. It was mostly the original…
I will freely admit that what originally interested me in being my own boss was the idea of making a lot of money. A million dollars in particular seemed like a great benchmark to reach. But I will also freely admit that this was back when I was ten years old and had no real…