Category: Business Planning
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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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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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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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Budget vs. Forecast: What’s the Difference?
TL;DR — budget = original performance contract; forecast = rolling best guess Our leadership team gathered in Vermont this week to review our latest quarterly performance and spend a few days hashing out big picture trends and goals. The agenda eventually steered toward the 2025 budget and where we thought the rest of the year would…
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A Guide for Good Meetings
Executing Quality Meetings Now that we’ve tackled the organizational chart for your business, we can move on to managing the org chart. The best tool for managing people in any company? Meetings. “A meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but…
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Right People, Right Seats (Part 2: Org Chart)
Systems and processes are a beautiful thing when executed properly. Today, we’re covering an ops playbook for managing your team. I’ll credit Jim Collins in Good to Great for the “right people, right seats” concept and Gino Wickman in Traction for the accountability chart tool. A quick overview of each: 1) Why does this matter? Your organizational chart is the single…
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Right People, Right Seats (Part 1: Management)
Most companies have 3 “senior leadership” seats with different roles to play. These are usually known as your management team: Notice how I said every business has these 3 seats, but not necessarily 3 (different) people sitting in them. Most business owners wear all 3 of these hats until the business reaches a certain size…
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Connect, Collaborate, & Conquer: Expand Your Network, Grow Your Profits
Over the weekend, I went to a trade show and met a number of very interesting people working on very interesting projects. One conversation went down the rabbit hole of the benefits (tangible and intangible) of networking. We agreed it best to approach networking from the standpoint of curiosity and learning (what’s your story? what…