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- Would you celebrate your mistakes?
- Learn processes from your employees at work
- Careful with terminations. Don’t disparage.
- Finding a strategic partner, investor or buyer
- Is ‘servant leadership’ too soft for you?
- Is “management by walking around” an outmoded fad?
- Stop managers from gaming the system!
- HIRE for talent. RENT for experience.
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Category Archives: Protecting the business
Budget from the top down or bottom up? A puzzle.
Here’s the argument: Many people believe that bottom-up budgeting leads to waste and misdirection. The advocates of top-down budgeting are strong in their belief that if you give each person or department no guidance, they will budget to their wants … Continue reading
Posted in Growth!, Protecting the business
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Recognize your five critical business risks.
If you could predict a crisis within your business before its occurrence, wouldn’t you move to prevent or reduce its impact? Making such predictions is a skill that can be developed, and here’s one method of doing so. First let’s … Continue reading
Posted in Protecting the business
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What can go wrong with your business growth?
So, your business has begun to take off. You’ve figured out your channels of distribution, pricing model and how to support your growing list of customers. Don’t be alarmed by this next statement. That’s relatively easy. You can be the … Continue reading
Posted in Growth!, Protecting the business
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Premature scaling can kill your business.
Here’s a lesson from experience. Venture capitalists sometimes make an error in directing their portfolio company CEOs to push resources to the limit and scale the business to immense size quickly, all to seize market share. The logic in this … Continue reading
Posted in Growth!, Protecting the business
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The four rules for motivating your employees with money.
We’ve debated this one forever it seems. Should be overwhelm prospective employees with stock options and perks? Or concentrate our available resources on just plain money as an attraction? Well, here are rules to make money work for you in … Continue reading
A tale of two CEO’s and the management of pain.
This is the tale of two CEOs, one of them unfortunately….me. It’s a story of how people handle unusual situations when selling to the top – an executive of a prospective customer. And the stories couldn’t be more different. … Continue reading
Posted in Depending upon others, General, Protecting the business
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Can you negotiate without emotion?
Here’s the problem. Negotiating an agreement, especially one that involves personal gain, is tough for the person personally involved. There is too much to lose to be objective, to be willing to walk when terms go upside down. What if … Continue reading
Are the “FIVE WHY’S” in your arsenal?
This is a trick headline. There can be three “whys” or twenty, depending upon the issue and the responses. To make the point, the word “why” has to be one of the more powerful words in your vocabulary. Asking the … Continue reading
Will you BURN the next manager you hire?
It seems to be a rule, not an exception. Many senior managers and early entrepreneurs create their own mess with this one. The first professional senior manager that an entrepreneur hires to share the growing workload does not last more … Continue reading
Is your CFO a bookkeeper or a strategist?
Here’s one that most small company founders and CEO’s miss until it may be too late. What is the role of a chief financial officer in growing and protecting the company? How about co-strategist? I recently coached a CFO in … Continue reading
