Blog
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We’re Not Thinking Big Enough
Supersize Me “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” — Doc Brown, Back to the Future Let me describe your typical business owner routine: In a nutshell, this is business ownership. This won’t be another newsletter on how to work on your business, instead I want to talk about thinking big. My business partner and I…
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A (Financial) Tale of Horror
The Curse of Growth “Control your own destiny or someone else will.” — Jack Welch Hope everyone had a Happy Halloween; in that spirit, how about a tale of horror? Imagine we’re running a business together (let’s say it’s a cleaning business) and we have ambitions for rapid growth over the next few years. Starting…
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Smart Owners Keep Getting Smarter
Compounding Knowledge “Those who keep learning will keep rising in life.” — Charlie Munger What was the MOST impactful thing you’ve learned recently? The truth is that you will never “find” time to take a step back from your business to learn, reflect, and improve. Instead, you’ll have to force yourself to make time for…
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Pulling Levers
Turning 1 into 2 “Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world” — Archimedes Leverage can be beautiful (just ask your banker), but what is it? Getting “leverage” means creating a multiplier effect in your business. It’s exponential, not linear. It literally turns 1+1 into 3…
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Try Using This Underrated Financial Metric
Nice Assets “The goal is not to grow bigger; the goal is to grow better.” — Peter Drucker What’s your favorite underrated financial metric? (seriously, reply and let me know) Mine is the asset turnover ratio (total sales divided by total assets), and I finally came across a great example of it in the wild: fast-casual restaurant chain,…
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Planning Made Simple
Planning What’s a plan? “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower I recently finished reading The 12 Week Year (covered in Book Recommendations Volume I) and already find myself putting these into practice. Note: this sort of time planning is different from business planning. Let’s see if I can use the Feynman Technique to…
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Books Every Business Owner Should Read (Vol. I)
Grab a book “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.” — Charlie Munger I sat down to write this week’s article with plenty of topics in mind (an acquisition I’m working on, planning for Q4 goals, navigating a debt recap, and various other…
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Do More By Doing Less: 12 Quick Simplifiers
“Perfect is the enemy of good.” — Voltaire Let’s say you’ve been running a business for several years now and you’re feeling overwhelmed by the amount of “stuff” to do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. What are some fast and easy ways to “simplify” things in your business and workload to make life easier?…
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About to run out of cash? Here’s what to do
Most businesses fall into 3 buckets: Let’s start with a brief “playbook” on managing a tight cash situation in an attempt to move from the first bucket to the 2nd bucket: Many of these are straight out of the turnaround playbook with an emphasis on short-term cash management. These tactics are best suited for struggling…
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The Intersection of Sales & Profit (FINAL PART)
Sales & Profit Today, we’re wrapping up a 4-part series on sales & marketing & profit: Check out the links above to recap previous articles. Our goal today is to improve decision making when it comes to sales & marketing (S&M) efforts through feedback loops. First, what is a feedback loop? We measure our marketing…