Why Every Small Business Owner Should Have a Mentor

There’s one essential item you’re missing that’s key to your continued success. No, it’s not your business plan, mission statement or investors (though the latter may be necessary!). No matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, you can benefit from having a professional mentor. If you’ve never had a mentor, you’re missing out on…

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15 Tips That Excelerate Performance

Developing loyal customers begins with developing a team who understand the importance of customer-focused service and care about the total customer experience. A key building block of developing high performance employees is recognizing the behaviors that you want repeated—those that ultimately create loyalty with your customer. Employees who receive regular recognition are happier in their…

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5 Ways Managers Should Support Their Employees

It’s essential that staff receive support or they can’t do their job properly. Support isn’t limited to merely work-related aspects of the job but to other things such as morale and recognition as well. There are plenty of different ways employers can support their staff. Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind in your…

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4 Simple Ways to Boost Team Morale and Engagement

It’s a well-known fact that happy employees are more productive, loyal, and more likely to stay in their role for a longer amount of time. But as an employer or manager, how do you keep morale high and ensure it stays that way? Read on for our top tips on boosting team morale and keeping…

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10 Important Marketing Predictions for 2017

Now that 2017 has arrived, it’s important to stay abreast of ever-changing marketing, branding, and customer experience best practices. Although predictions abound online, many focus on large companies and enterprises. So, I did a bit of research for you and put together a list of 10 marketing predictions that can apply to any-sized organization, especially…

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The Value of Feedback: How Talking to Customers Can Drive Innovation

As an entrepreneur, seeing your product gain traction for the first time is a rush. The early years of ContextMedia were some of the most exciting. During the summer of 2006, as rising juniors in college, we decided to act on a business idea we felt passionately about: bringing technology into the consumer healthcare space…

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Start, Stop, Do Different

Many people are familiar with the expression, Start, Stop, Do Different from personal evaluation processes—those regularly scheduled reviews by our supervisor. Management will often use this outline to give us feedback about our performance. But I also think it should be used more regularly, both personally and with colleagues. No leader improves without feedback and…

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5 Keys to Crossing the Chasm to Mainstream Customers

Every technical entrepreneur is an early adopter of technology, so naturally they build things with people like themselves in mind. Unfortunately, for most solution markets, early adopters represent only 10 to 15 percent of the total opportunity, so it’s easy to get mislead on the real requirements of mainstream customers. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias.…

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