Customers are the life-blood of any business. No customers, no business. Armed with this valuable knowledge, you’d think that businesses would be trying every trick in the book to make their customers happy; to turn them into lifelong allies; to create brand ambassadors that will act as an unpaid marketing salesforce extraordinaire. But alas, it’s not to be. Most businesses …

Companies that are service providers are often dealing with more than one customer. Yes, there’s one main client, the one that’s actually paying for our services, but there’s often an intermediary involved who’s responsible for bringing us that paying customer. If we don’t make the process seamless and painless for that intermediary, then the likelihood of future referrals dramatically decreases. …

If you’re really good at operating your software, a mediocre inspector can finish inspecting the average house in under an hour. Wham, bam, thank you mam (or sir). The hard part of doing a home inspection is not the data entry. Once you know your software, that’s easy. According to the Infinite Monkey Theorem, any monkey with a keyboard can …

How do I make more money? It’s a question that we’ve all asked ourselves, at one time or another (or maybe every day). And most of us fall back to the old way of thinking: I’ll just work more hours. Work for a longer amount of time, doing the same menial job, following the same well-worn routine, producing the same …

We’re all wondering how we can be more involved. How can we write the rules? How can we affect change? How can we be the one they turn to? How can we increase our standing? How can we be more valuable to everyone else in our industry? Well, things rarely happen just because we want them to. Sitting back and …

Whether we run a small business or not, we’re all the proprietor of our own company: the company of ourself. We’re the boss; we make the calls; we run the show. Whatever happens to our company, ultimately, we’re the one who’s responsible for getting us there. We should all take a step back and look at our company. How do …

We’ve all got our weak points, be they technology, personal interaction, or detailed knowledge of our jobs. The weak points are there, helping to keep us from getting ahead. The trick is to be dedicated enough to improve, and not let our fears stand in the way of getting better. We can be thankful that we’re much luckier than anyone …

We’re all too nice. We’re hard-wired to want to please other people, so we often end up saying yes to too many things. Requests of our time. Items that land in our inbox. Small jobs that eat up way too much time for too little gain. Can you do me a favor, this one little thing, would you do this …

Just because someone out there has a microphone, a channel, a stage, or a platform doesn’t mean that we’ve got to listen. They may know what they’re talking about, but odds are that they won’t. That doesn’t mean some of us won’t still listen. It’s up to us to do the research. Ask questions. Check their sources. Follow up on …

There are plenty of things wrong in this world, and many of these things directly affect our lives. When we were young, things appeared so much simpler. Most of our perceived problems could be solved with a snap of the fingers: boom; done; finished; all better. Too bad it doesn’t work that way anymore. The sad truth is that most …