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Container Store operates 59 locations, booked sales of $707m last year and six years ago sold a majority stake to a Private Equity House. CEO Kip Tindell was interviewed on March 21 by the WSJ. Key comments he made and my suggested actions for your business are highlighted in this post. Read More

The WSJ ran a great piece by Leslie Kwoh called Memo To Staff: Take More Risks highlighting the move by some CEOs to encourage staff to innovate, try things and to stop just surviving. Seth Godin’s latest book The Icarus Deception shouted a similar theme – we’re all flying too low! So how do you en Read More

This post sets out the key dangers of thinking and acting in departmental silos. The finance team produce accurate financial numbers but fail to report declines in operational ratios, units, and margins, robbing marketing & sales departments of powerful insights. Product launches are impeccably on Read More

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a brilliant piece in The New Yorker last year diving into the new biography on Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Gladwell highlights the role of Jobs as a tweaker of an idea, then a transformation of that idea into something better. This post explores the key role of Tweaking to Read More

You’ve built the business from scratch or acquired it when it was smaller and struggling. The business has grown under your efforts, passion and leadership. You believe you are the founder and they call you the CEO or President as a job title. The question is – what’s your performance profile toda Read More

It may seem to you as an owner of an SMB (sales $5m to $100m) that acquisitions are a big boy game. Nonsense. Parking money and post acquisition integration expertise, this post highlights the benefits to SMB owners of growing by acquisition. Read More

Your top numbers person is also a key driver for improving your business but you need to realize it. You need to capitalize on that smart brain. Don't push your CFO/controller into a narrow role. Demand a wider agenda. Start by asking your CFO these 10 questions. Read More

Last month there was a very interesting blog post entitled - Help! My Sales Team Thinks Our Inbound Leads Suck. The post highlighted various tactics to deploy to change the sales team's attitude to embrace these beautiful things called inbound leads. Specifically it highlighted the need to treat th Read More

Whether you played sport at school, college or perhaps professionally you understand only too well how your mental approach often dictated success. This post explores why it matters. Read More

In his latest book To Sell Is Human; Daniel Pink explores the concept of serving as a more effective mindset and approach for sales professionals to move prospects. He believes we are all selling in some way today. If you are trying to move others, you are selling. Specifically the research strongl Read More