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It takes an engaged team, or a group of well-connected teams, to build and run a business today. The days of a single autocratic leader are gone. In my consulting work with small businesses and startups, I find that real teamwork is still a rare commodity. Fortunately, it’s a skill you can start to Read More

In my experience as an angel investor for new startups, I’m always surprised by how many entrepreneurs are looking for funding without outside advisors. An experienced Board can give them credibility, as well as advice on the many pitfalls of starting a new company. Especially if you are a first-ti Read More

In my experience as an advisor and mentor to entrepreneurs in business, one of the biggest failures I see is a lack of self-leadership. You can’t lead a business to success, if you can’t lead yourself. I define self-leadership as the capacity to set direction and make decisions, to positively drive Read More

Too many customers have long felt distanced from many successful brands, seeing them as closed and mysterious environments, focused only on profits and killing competitors. They may not have noticed the wave of “open businesses,” spawned by the Internet and social media. These are responding to the Read More

Perhaps sparked by the recent pandemic, I’m seeing a new era of the entrepreneur, with startups springing up all around. Based on my own mentoring and investing experience, the best entrepreneurs are pragmatic problem solvers. They have an uncanny ability to find elegant, easy, and fast solutions t Read More

Every entrepreneur can learn from a mentor, no matter how confident or successful they have been to date. Most people don’t know that billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, for example, gives real credit to the inspiring mentorship of Steve Jobs for Mark’s Facebook success. Yet most entrepreneurs simply don’ Read More

As a long-time mentor to new entrepreneurs and business owners, I have noticed that many no longer associate more fulfillment and satisfaction with more money, power, and success. It seems that fulfillment to these new entrepreneurs is all about changing the world and legacy. In fact, customers tod Read More

In my experience with business leaders, real innovation thinking is rare, compared to the urge to add just one more feature to an existing product, or make a small tweak to an existing business model. I call this linear thinking, and it’s a sure way to be ultimately overrun by your competition. I’m Read More

Every one of you business leaders I know struggles with the competing demands of finding and keeping employees motivated and satisfied, versus building and enforcing a set of repeatable processes that work. Obviously, both are required for a company to stay healthy and growing. In my experience, pr Read More

A perfect storm is an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances aggravates an environment drastically. In the entrepreneur world, I feel we are in such a situation now for new startups, with the confluence of business transformations, the explosion of new digital Read More