Category: Uncategorized

Show notes from podcast episode 45. I rarely dive into my my own business here but I have a story and a lesson worth sharing. I’m always learning and failing and getting back up and pressing onward. I got some bad news this week. A self storage development project that I had been working on […]

5 years is plenty of time to design the life you wan’t. You don’t need to work 45 years just to retire to then finally get to design your schedule and do what you want to do. Five years from now, if you have the best 5 years of your life from today forward, what […]

Doing this while you have a full time job is the perfect way to start. More on that here. Step 1: Do a quick and dirty market study – start searching and calling competitors. Use trends.google.com to find out which company in your town is the largest (most search volume) and study them. Are they doing digital marketing? Are they putting […]

1. Add value first Gain trust by providing something of value first without expectation. This gets you very far with customers and personal relationships. Don’t squeeze your customers for every penny, especially early. Too many people are tight lipped with helpful advice. Share it. Gain trust and thus loyalty and profit later. 2. 80 percent of your […]

Wine sommeliers often can’t tell the difference between a $20 bottle and a $2,000 bottle in a double blind test. The food at the $20/person restaurant and the food at the $200/person restaurant. The beer at the top rated brewery or the guy brewing in his basement. In a double blind test – who has […]

Ego is good early on. The confidence. The drive for status and image. It gets us far. It gives us the courage to disregard the anxiety and fear of failure. The lizard brain that tells us to run for cover when things get scary. We all agree that you don’t need to be a superhuman […]

Back in 2012, when I was unsure of the success of my storage venture, I casted a few other nets. One of them was a Lawn Care google place and wordpress website with a few pages. As you know I had mowed a few lawns in high school so I got a few of those […]

Don’t forget to think LOCAL and don’t be afraid to start VERY SMALL. Even if you plan to start an internet company. Start LOCAL. Start a business where you can interact with your customers face to face. Even Zuck founded facebook only at Harvard. Roll out a city at a time. Sell something local at […]

Show notes from podcast episode 28 First of all there are a lot of different types of partnerships. In this article we discuss the co-founder. Someone who you bring on initially and they get ownership no matter what. No vesting schedule. No cliff. No way out if things go wrong. This article is the cautious […]

An interesting thing is happening with the podcast. I’m getting a lot of emails from people who have found holes in markets. But their solution is to help the businesses get more customers. Lead generation, website consulting, SEO work, etc for child care centers, HVAC contractors, doctors and all the other 1985 businesses. They don’t […]