Annie Kile

Your small business is your baby and, like most parents, sometimes it’s tough to remain objective. There can also be a bit of ego involved when assessing the efficacy of your small business strategies for achieving the vision and mission of your small business. After all, a lot of personal effort went into creating those strategies, objectives, and tactics – and that can make it difficult to let go of what isn’t working.

As a matter-of-fact, it is quite possible to think you are accurately ...

I just read a comment on a LinkedIn post that asked for opinions about an article posted on The Harvard Business Review entitled “Want Productive Employees? Treat Them Like Adults.” The article was an insightful piece written by Tony Schwartz, president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. He’s definitely a guy who doesn’t just “talk the talk” – he walks the walk when it comes to treating his employees like adults.

The focus of Schwartz’s ...

We don’t all live in New York City, San Francisco, or Chicago - which means many of us depend upon local small theater companies if we want to see a play. In a sense your customers and clients depend on your local small business in the same way. You not only provide customers and clients with the products or services they need, but provide this on a local basis.

Going to the theater and operating a business may not seem to have too much in common. But theater companies and ...

The 80/20 Rule states that 20% of the things you do produce 80% of the results you get. Of course the numbers can vary – but the principle of the rule never changes: Most outcomes (results) are produced by much fewer numbers of inputs (work.) In other words, much of what you’re doing isn’t really amounting to much. And this can be especially true for small business owner who spend most of their time with a select group of customers they’ve misidentified as their “best customers.”
...

Like the lyrics of Tim McGraw’s hit song many people (at least those of us born more than 20 years ago) can’t help but think it’s possible that “We got too complicated. It's all way over-rated.”

Now, it may be true that there are those of us longing for the days when “a Coke was a Coke” – but has it occurred to you that you may have customers who feel the same way occasionally? Customers who just might “miss back when” if they wanted to let you know they liked something they didn’t ...