Technology Will Not Run Your Business for You
We now have more tech applications than ever before, why hasn't our life become easier? Twenty years ago someone would have laughed at you if you told them the last thing you'd like to do with a cellphone is receive a phone call. The cellphone was an industry-breaker when it was introduced to the market. For years it competed with traditional phones, pagers, even just faxing. Email and IM's and every other single piece of communicationbrought to the market since have created a market of diversified interest and -... Read More
Monday October 11, 2021
The 5 Questions to Shut Down an Argument
Employee Disputes are Time-Consuming and Frustrating Having to cut an Employee i s simply bad for business because you have to train and retrain or just lose face when negative turnover repeatedly hits your business. Ever work for a company that has a "certain reputation"? This guy gets it. Better put, read any articles or watch any YouTube Videos recently that talk about companies having high turnover? It's a problem in our times, to be sure. 9 times out of 10 when an employee makes a mistake It's probably... Read More
Friday September 10, 2021
How to write a Business Plan in 3 Steps
You need a Business Plan Right? I mean it sounds like the kind of thing not having would be like admitting you aren't qualified to sart a business. I mean, you're going to start a business. Without a plan? Whiteboards look cool but are really inefficient. Tim Proctor and Craig Lysen Are pair of easy-going Vets who spend days on their program Check Your Six chatting about the Grind of business ownership. For about a year now, they've been out to prove when it comes to starting, owning and operating a... Read More
Friday September 3, 2021
The Best (and Hardest) Parts of Owning a Business - Luis Arias of CakeMakersStudio
If you're wondering how to start a business when you don't know what to do, Luis Arias of CakeMakersStudio has some advice for you. I'm standing in a kitchen Where Luis Arias is delicately massaging sheets of perfectly chilled, sculpted sugar onto a layer of finely baked white chocolate cake laid out in the form of the Millennium Falcon. His pace is deliberate and methodical, he's focused and calm. He's placing every piece, sculpted well in advance, onto the siding of the Falcon with no guide or video tuturial pulled up in front... Read More
Friday August 27, 2021
Entre-Consumerism
Marketing is a Different Game in 2021 The era of challenging brands and comparing yourself to the "leading competitors" feels like a bygone era (point in fact the cola wars turned 40 last year , nobody won). Brands today seek for personal stakes and to stand out from competitors purely on their style and value propositions. To be well-branded is to be unique, thus comparisons have become very non-chiq. "What's a Pepsi?" So why the change? The easy answer is just to say that change happens to everything, things do that.... Read More
Friday August 13, 2021
The Advice Professionals would give their Younger Selves
LinkedIn Recently collected Business Owners Advice to their Younger Selves And it became a treasure trove of interesting and helpful advice with answers ranging from practical and functional to humurous and sincere. Yet from among them all (or contained within a bulleted list) one answer stood repeated among the others. Words varied on the most popular advice: Don't focus on the "What if's", "Steer Clear of limiting beliefs", "Don't think too much" - the message was the same: Work is done in action, not in thought. ... Read More
Friday August 6, 2021
You Don't Have to be New (To make it in Business)
When Thomas Edison Invented the Lightbulb he got it Right on the First Try. Oh wait no. That's the most fraudulently untrue thing anyone has ever said about Thomas Edison. Picured: Without question the words of someone who knew exactly what they were doing the whole time. Beyond discovering thousands of ways to incorrectly assemble a lightbulb, Edison leaned heavily upon the contributions of other inventors, talents, scientiests and luminaries of his time to accomplish his "invention", and while being... Read More
Friday July 30, 2021
Startups, Risk, and the Minimum Wage
When the First Federal Minimum Wage was presented to Congress, it was not widely Supported. When it was presented in 1933 in the National Industrial Recovery Act Congress overturned it on the grounds that it was Unconstitutional. It wasn't until Franklin Delenor Roosevelt presented it as part of the New Deal - The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 - that it was enacted in the sum of $0.25/hr (about $4.60 by the standard of 2017). Since that time, the Federal Minimum wage has served as a National Standard - partially upheld by Federal... Read More
Friday July 23, 2021
How Rut Patel started Voyager Industries
It took Two Years of grinding on Minimum Wage for Rut to buy his first Commercial Drone It was a 5,000 dollar investment, but he had a concept and ideas for simplifying municipal probems across multiple industries. "I would listen to Podcasts Driving to improve my English, and I heard the story of Captain Cortez [...] When he arrived in Spain, he had a few hundred men against a thousand." Rut recalls to me that when Cortez' crew learned the odds they were up against, they began to panic. They considered a mutiny. "He kept... Read More
Thursday July 1, 2021
Interview with Rut Patel, CEO of Voyager Industries
At Nineteen, Rut Patel went through a Visa Interview to enter the United States. "What's your favorite American Food?", they asked. "Pizza" he said. And then he panicked. Rut learned early in life that simple questions don't always lend themselves to simple answers. As a programmer, I can relate. The difference of recognizing a problem is not the same thing as understanding how to answer it. From his background in simple engineering, Rut applied his intelligence upon arriving in the United States to found Voyager Industries,... Read More
Friday June 25, 2021
The Subtle Art of Saying No (By Saying Yes)
The first rule of Business is to Provide a Service and see a Return. We call this an exchange, and it's the same process across the board. Pointing this out should come as an education for nobody, yet it's alarming with how common exchange is in our lives that it gets so messy. If you start your business to help people but work at such a steep discount, how long will your business sustain itself? How available will you be? Truth is: in Business as in life, you just can't say yes to everything. Entrepreneurship will teach you... Read More
Monday June 7, 2021
5 Life Lessons from Running a Software Company
This is a big one. No flashy intros, let's get right into it. 1. It's not always the big things that will nickel and dime you. Running a business is expensive . Which is ironic when you consider most companies work for profit. Whatever profit model, whatever practice, business building is a high-market, high-investment endeavor. If it isn't capital it's labor, if it isn't labor it's design, if it isn't design it's finance, around and around. The costliest thing in business is just being out of your zone. I mean... Read More
Friday May 28, 2021
What's the Point of a Business Coach?
When you're Running a Business, Mistakes are Expensive. Got your attention? I mean really expensive . Doing the wrong thing converts to lost time, lost money, lost reputation with clients or whole communities of people. That's thinking small. Well-invested time with a coach can help you avoid missteps in your business which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hiring the wrong employee for salary scale, working with the wrong vendor, marketing your business to the wrong audience, building your company entirely in the wrong... Read More
Friday May 14, 2021
Do You Work Too Much
Over 126 million Americans say they Work too Hard. That's equivalent to 1/3 of the national population. Statistics show the real number could be as high as 40%, which is a considerable margin when one considers the number of employees I'm talking about. To put that number in perspective, for new business registrations 2020 saw a historic, record-breaking jump of just 12%, or an increase to 1.5Million . That's an economic response through-and-through, and it reveals how individuals are willing to trade risks under a particular kind... Read More
Friday May 7, 2021
Hiring in 2021 has Changed
So you're ready to Hire Someone That's great! No really, we mean it . Employees are the backbone of your business and bringing your first on is a huge milestone. Ideally at this point, you will have created written processes for your company so you will be ready with exactly what you want to delegate to your new staff. So now all that's left is to make a job listing, look at some resumes and pick the right candidate, right? Well, maybe not. Modern Employees have New Priorities Even different from what they had only just a... Read More
Friday April 30, 2021
Getting Through your First Year in Business
It might not be Fair to say that Everyone's First Year in Business is going to be the Same ... But I'm still going to say it. For most entrepreneurs, the struggles of a first-year enterprise are ubiquitous. What are my resources, where do I apply my focus, how much time do I give myself to make it work. This week, our group of Small Business owners got together to discuss these topics on Clubhouse, here are our takeaways. Early in the 2010's, Chelsea left her job to go into Business for Herself She pulled together the... Read More
Friday April 23, 2021
The Upside of a Bad Client
I've been joining a weekly room in Clubhouse for Small Business Owners. It's a small room filled with a lot of potential. Business owners come in weekly to speak on topics like Market Strategy, the new culture of ecommerce, and methods for startups. As the resident vagabond for Dave Talks Business , I come in for the value, the insight, and now: to put those thoughts to writing for your benefit. This week we talked about bad clients (and what to do about them). For Small Businesses, Bad Clients can have a Big Impact They... Read More
Friday April 16, 2021
Who is in Control of your Business
Is it your clients? Is it your staff? As a business owner, knowing how to delegate tasks within your business is essential, but it’s also just the first step. Delegating work only adds value if the person you delegate to knows how to perform the task you put before them. The Problem of Compromising Before today I've discussed the turmoil of managing a difficult client and how to be a better manager for your employees . When looking to these things, I've pointed to the processes you should learn and... Read More
Thursday April 8, 2021
8 Common Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
What are the most common mistakes made in advertising? Frequently, I find that the approach to marketing is typically less structured and more of a random smorgasbord of unrelated marketing attempts. One example, you get a voucher in the mail for $100 worth of free pay-per-click advertising with Google. You figure this is found money, and you are anxious to put it to work. After setting up your campaign and loading in 50 different keywords at $1 per click, you find that the entire $100 has been spent in just a few hours, and you have made no... Read More
Thursday April 1, 2021
Entrepreneurship for 6th Graders
In May 2016, I had the privilege of teaching a classroom of 6th graders at Severance Middle School how to create a new product and prepare it for market. The program was created by Junior Achievement Rocky Mountain , a non-profit organization that is "dedicated to inspiring and preparing young people to succeed in a global economy". As an entrepreneur, I was impressed with the quality and accuracy of the curriculum - it translates directly to how real business is done. I started the day off in the auditorium where several classes... Read More
Monday March 15, 2021
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