How to Make Big Money in a Small Town

When we imagine big businesses, we tend to imagine tall offices in impressive buildings at the center of some of the world’s most powerful cities: London, New York, Seoul, Sydney, and — if it’s a tech company — San Francisco. The idea is that, in order to thrive, your business needs to be located where…

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21 Lead Magnet Ideas to Pull in Your Top Prospects

If you aren’t optimizing your lead magnets, consider yourself guilty of gross mismanagement! But before we toss out 20-plus lead magnet ideas for you to test out, let’s quickly define what we mean by the term “lead magnet.” A lead magnet is an offer you make to prospects in exchange for their contact information. Before…

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5 Awesome Tools for Running a Small Business

Regardless of size, running a business is no piece of cake. From acquiring new customers to retaining existing ones; from successfully managing projects to maintaining happy employees; and from growth planning to profit evaluation; there are many considerations for businesses to address. Considering the importance of technology and the power of apps, entrepreneurs should leverage…

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Even a Taste of Ownership Motivates Employees

How about employees all the way down the line and through the corporation? How do we align them to the goals and strategies of the enterprise? Obviously for the appropriate individuals, a bonus program aligned to the department’s goals is appropriate. But how about awarding stock options for all employees? I discovered the power of…

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Should We Kill Marketing?

“What if everything we know to be true about marketing is actually what’s holding back our business?” And in fact – “what if we realize we’ve invested the shipwreck of marketing?” An interesting way to start a marketing book, eh? I just finished a fascinating new book, Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost…

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7 Bold Predictions for Digital Marketing in 2018

Every year around this time I take a step back and to ponder some predictions for our field for the coming year. Some come to be, others are a few years early, and then there’s predictions I’m still waiting to come true years later. You can’t win them all, unfortunately. That said, the trends I’m…

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Profits Eat Innovation for Breakfast

Michael Porter said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This is the first thing that popped into my mind when I read Steve Blank’s HarvardBusiness Review article explaining why Jeff Immelt lost his job as CEO of GE. Steve argues activist investors forced out Immelt because of the long, languishing performance of the company’s stock. Following Mr. Immelt out…

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7 Things Wannabe Entrepreneurs Need to Know

What do entrepreneurs need to know as they get started? Of course there’s need to know, absolutely; and there’s ought to know. I was asked to come up with a list, and here is my best guess. Know the difference between cash and profits. You Think in Profits, but You Live on Cash.Things like sales on…

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