A bi-weekly roundup of holy problems and divine solutions January 25 - February 7 The First Commandment: Thou Shalt Solve Sometimes I wonder if I should start a religion about solving problems. I would call it "Entrepreneurship" and our church would be our beds at 2am, praying to the almighty Cash Flow to save us from the sins of... ...ourselves. Time and time again, I talk to new business owners, agency leaders, and Japanese entrepreneurship students that have fallen in love with their own...
24 days ago • 3 min read
A bi-weekly roundup of ways to disagree with your colleagues, gracefully January 11 - January 24 Image courtesty BiteSize Learning Step Confidently Into Conflict I finished delivering two weeks of performance management training and the concept that grabbed my learners the most was the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Model. It was 2/3rds of the way through the day, post-lunch, so it should have been the most sleepy topic...but everyone perked up and started asking really good questions. What's the...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
A bi-weekly analysis of hobbies that may someday make millions December 28 - January 10 How To Create An AI Agent, Today! Last fall at Hubspot's INBOUND conference, Hubspot's Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah unveiled his pet project: Agent.ai. I signed up immediately. My opinion is that when a successful tech person who founds a multi-billion dollar tech company shares free signups to their new tech pet project, you should sign up immediately. Anyone's hobby that's on the bleeding edge of tech...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
A bi-weekly roundup of EOY fears December 14 - December 27 Wrap Up The Old Year With Your Fears In the last TL;DR, I asked whether you set New Years Resolutions and got an amazing 50/50 split: I'm fascinated by the intersection of goals and fears and not many people do fear better than Tim Ferriss. You may know him from his "4-hour Workweek/Body/Chef/etc." empire of self-help content. If you're in the entrepreneurial world, it's hard to miss him: he's got his marketing and branding on lock...
2 months ago • 3 min read
A bi-weekly roundup of ways to rethink 2025 November 30 - December 13 (SO SPOOKY) Fresh Starts They Are A Comin' Most people seem to fall into two camps regarding New Years Resolutions They embrace January 1st with SMART goals and hope They actively ignore the New Years Resolution hype and say, "I'm not a resolution kind of person" I'm trying out something new here: I'd like to see YOUR vote in the poll! You'll see the poll results immediately after submitting your answer. Do you tend to set...
3 months ago • 3 min read
More How, Less Hype Hi Reader, If you haven't been living under a rock for the past few years, your inboxes, feeds, and networking events are filled with people breathlessly talking about the potential of AI. Pilots. Proof of concepts. It's all about Potential. Instead of more hype, we're going to show you every place we use AI in our Small Agency Assessment (currently on a Black Friday special), why we're using it, and how we compensate for its shortcomings. 1. Call Analysis We use Fathom...
3 months ago • 2 min read
A bi-weekly roundup of Opportunities November 16 - November 29 Opportunity Knocks for Opportunity Marketing Hi Reader, Let me tell you about Gerald Osprey and his agency, Opportunity Marketing. Gerald started his marketing agency about six years ago after being laid off. For those early years, he tapped his network to do all kinds of work: SEO, content writing, some paid media advising. After the first two years, Gerald was booking about $100K in annual recurring revenue (ARR). In year three,...
3 months ago • 4 min read
A bi-weekly roundup of putting hard-earned dollars to work November 2 - November 15 'Tis the Season for Spending I love Black Friday. It's not just because I'm a business owner, but I consider myself a pretty penurious person and find it difficult to treat myself. It's a constant running joke in my household that I love massages, I can afford massages, but I don't get one unless I've "earned" it in some arcane way, which means I end up getting 1-2 massages a year. Replace "massage" in that...
4 months ago • 4 min read
A bi-weekly roundup of mad-->argue-->sad-->move on October 19 - November 1 Talk About Change! I recently delivered a full day training on Change Management and a good third of it was about communication. For those of you unfamiliar with the Kübler-Ross Change Curve, think about the last time that someone broke up with you: first you get emotional, then you rationalize how much better you are off without that person, then you eat a whole pizza and cry a little bit while watching Moana, and...
4 months ago • 2 min read