Always Keep Your Promises
To develop a strong brand, you have to get customers to know your value proposition. They should know what makes you different from your competitors. But it’s not enough for them to just know what you say makes you different; they should know from seeing you fulfill your promises.
Read More Abraham Lincoln: Business Lessons
Abraham Lincoln is one of the most enduring, inspiring figures in American history. His popularity is unwavering, and is as high as ever thanks to Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln. Every president aspires to be like Lincoln, but they shouldn’t be the only ones. The life and career of President Lincoln has plenty of great business lessons.
Read MoreWhy We Miss Our Goals
Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar. You know exactly what you want to do. You have it all figured out. And then somewhere along the line, something happens. You’re not even sure what it was—all you know is the end result: whatever it was you were planning, it didn’t get done.
Read More Keeping the Entrepreneurial Spirit Alive
As any business ages and grows, it will change. You don’t always do things the same way you did as a startup. The quest for innovation and new approaches to problems often gradually give way to a focus on incremental improvements and doing what you’ve always done, just a little bit better. This problem is part of what is widely known as The Innovator’s Dilemma, after the title of the book by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen.
Read More The Power of Persistence
Everyone has times when they fail. It’s easy to separate the world into two camps, those who are succeeding and those who aren’t, but what we often miss is that people move back and forth between those two groups all the time. Today’s great success was yesterday’s failure—and might fail again tomorrow. The key is persistence.
Read More Everything Is Marketing
To succeed, every small business owner has to learn how to market his or her products and services. That’s why SmallBizClub.com’s first Success Saturday event was focused on the topic “Everything Is Marketing.”
Read More 3 Simple Steps to Maintaining a Successful Company Blog
Chances are pretty high that if you run your own company, it probably has its own blog that more often than not serves as a reflection of the business itself. A company blog shows readers what sort of business you’re running and gives them an inside look at just how you run things. As such, the company blog develops a voice all on its own that’s often pretty conversational as well as informational, so it’s important that your customers are finding the answers to the questions that they have and keep coming back for more with your blog.
Read More Succession Planning
What will happen to your business after you retire? Most small business owners want their companies to survive after they leave, but only a small fraction of businesses actually manage to last into a second generation. To make it, you need an effective succession plan.
Read More Building a Culture of Growth
A culture that encourages and rewards growth can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you build an organization, the right emphases and values can be a strong factor for growth. It requires every member of the team, from top to bottom, to buy into the right principles and beliefs.
Read More Marketing Help from Your Vendors
You need every marketing edge you can get. An oft-overlooked opportunity is using your vendors to fuel business growth. While you’re already getting services of course, you can get more if you’re willing to pay more and incentivize your vendors to help you.
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