According to the statistics from the Department of Labor and Commerce my business was not supposed to last this long. This month, The A Group turns 10 years old. Only 29 out of 100 new businesses that started 10 years ago are still in business today. Not only we are still open for business, we…
This past weekend I happened upon Uniqlo on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. I must confess, I didn’t know anything about the brand, but after shopping in its brand new 90,000 square foot flagship store, I have become a fan. I’m enthusiastic not because I like their clothing, which I do, but because in a time…
Sometimes you have to fire your clients. That sounds almost wrong until you give it some thought. Early in entrepreneurial career, I would say “yes” to anyone willing to hire me. The reasoning was simple: I needed to eat and someone was willing to pay for what I had to offer. However, over the years…
Nothing has had a greater impact on how I do business than text messaging. Not long ago, I was on a conference call with someone in Texas, someone in Sao Paulo, Brazil and I was in a car driving through New York City. The conversation sounded clear in spite of the thousands of miles and…
We fear that Wall Street is still spiraling out of control, our economic system might in total chaos and the sky might be falling as well. While I find myself very concerned about our financial future, there’s something about a shake down in the way we do business that excites me. In my experience, difficult…
Your dream venture might never happen not because it’s not a good idea or it’s not needed, but because it might be under resourced. Entrepreneurs in their zeal to get their dreams birthed usually shortchange the true cost of what it takes to create a sustainable business. Here’s some of the most common mistakes: You…
Whether you are ready to launch a new website, program, software, retail store, new product or even a new church campus, you need to know when it’s ready–not halfway and not overdone, but ready. I have coined a term for what the perfect launch stage, I call it “critical mass.” When launching something new, our…
We purposely don’t have many sacred cows in the businesses that I run. We adapt and change fast and have become “platform agnostics” so we can server our clients better in a fast-changing business environment. Sacred cows only slow things down and are always self serving. There are three things, however, that we fight hard…
We all have stress in our work, but there is a big difference between what I call “corporate stress” and “entrepreneurial stress.” I have dealt with both and I have chosen the entrepreneurial stress. Here’s why. I hear often from friends who work in a corporate environment about the challenges they face daily. While the…
Systems, not vision, determine the sustainability of your dream. This has been a difficult lesson for me to learn, but over the years, I have met many a visionary leader whose dreams grew to a fraction of their potential because of the lack of an environment where the vision could thrive. Vision must come first…