Tag: entrepreneur
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Burnout is no badge of honor.
If you squint your eyes just enough, tilt your head at the right angle, and hold your breath for a count of 10, you might see burnout as the result of lazy, incomplete, ineffective, and bad business design. We hear a lot of ‘success stories’ about founders and CEOs working 12-16 hours each day, providing…
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Data is not the story. Nor is it marketing
Modern marketing is ever-more difficult to distinguish from data. But it is crucial that we put forth continued effort to separate them in order to best invest our resources. Here is my take on it. Marketing is the story. Multiple stories, actually! – The story about why and how you (the brand, product, team, individual,…
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Everything is Marketing. Marketing is Everything!
Everything we do and don’t do communicates something about us, our values, preferences, and personalities. It helps us build trust and social bonds to those around us, as well as to seek other places/groups where we can easily connect. This applies to individuals, small business entities, and large corporations equally. Humans evolved to communicate at…
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Listen, connect, innovate.
These three words will do wonders in EVERY relationship you have – both business and personal. As simple as it sounds, it represents a lifetime commitment of practice, patience, getting it wrong, and improving. LISTEN:It must start here. Hear the words others say as well as what they don’t say. By following the ‘anatomic rule’…
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Give More TIME
FACT: We all have the same 24 hours each day. What we get largely comes down to how we allocate those moments. Let me be clear, “Give More Time” is NOT about giving all of your time away. It is about establishing ways to be selective about where you invest your time so that you…
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Profitability is Key to Sustainability
Sustainable business IS profitable. Let’s start with simple explanations of 2 key concepts with 7 words each. PROFIT: calculation of total revenue less total expenses. SUSTAINABILITY: The ability to continue operations perpetually. In order to continue operations, businesses need to collect more than they spend. Each business has a unique pattern to the sources, timing,…
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Easy Is Always Better
One way to gain huge advantages in the minds of the human buyers and users is to make things simple. Einstein has been famously attributed to a reminder to us all that if we can’t explain it simply enough for a 5th grader, we don’t understand it well enough. This applies to Business, Finance, Economics,…
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Celebrate Perpetually
There is an old management saying about catching people doing the right things and celebrating, rather than catching them doing something wrong and correcting them. It is hard work to do this day-in and day-out. Shortly after the new year, I began formally dedicating a portion of my day to writing out an actual list…
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Ideal Clients Are Not Always Ideal
It is easy to describe ideal clients/customers as being … well… perfect. As in:– Easy to identify and find digitally– Already know they have a problem or challenge– Currently looking for solution options– Funding approved– Ready to buy While some of these attributes ARE available, they alone are not likely to sustain your growth goals,…
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Dreams Require Processes
Ideal outcomes are like whimsical dreams without a process to bring them into reality. These 6 Key areas help channel efforts and energy into building systems that create ideal outcomes. They are presented in a circular design to suggest that it doesn’t matter where you begin. There is no particular order to follow. Start where…
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Strategy and Execution
Execution is a valuable and important skill to have in business. It shows up as our history. We can easily look back at the sum of the decisions we make and assess a judgement – Did we execute well? But execution is only half (at most) of the story! Strategy and purpose are what drive our decision-making and will…
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Only Execute Fully-Funded Projects
A mentor talked with me about only executing fully-funded projects early in my career. I feel strong and confident every time I use this tip to make a decision about where to invest my energies. I have been burned every time I go against this methodology. As have countless others. One trick I have learned…
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Importance of Innovation
#Innovation is the ONLY way to change your current situation, direction or hope to get new results. It can seem scary when you don’t have ample resources of time, money, friends, or whatever. It might not “work”. Meaning it might not bring the results you intend. But trying something new will always bring new results and #feedback.…
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Simple Rules For Communication
1st Rule of Marketing and Communications:Say something you believe and that people want to hear. It is about being original in your perspective, not just verbal vomit 2nd Rule:Say it clearly, and in appropriate channel. 3rd Rule:Repeat and refine your message, audience, and channel. These rules are alarmingly simple and easy to overlook. They are…
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Finding Your Marketing Sweet-spot
Marketing initiatives and strategies are as unique and diverse as humanity. There is NEVER a single best-solution for any brand, product, service, or industry. Rather, each marketing and leadership team must determine their own goals, outcomes, and objectives they wish to achieve with their efforts and find a range of nuanced tactics that serve them…
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How Do You Harness Engagement?
How do you build #engagement beyond social and digital platforms? Many consider engagement strictly as a buying signal and assign points or metrics as a form of progress towards a purchase. But there are many times when engagement is consistently very high, yet there is no opportunity to transact.– Industry Incompatibility: maybe respectful peers like…
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Platinum Rule For Business
Happy, safe, and trusting humans are THE BIGGEST KEY to any business being able to operate. It is the foundation for employment, leadership, buying, and selling. Surely, we can all agree that there is no way a business can make money without these systems in place. Today’s business environment is often demanding that these systems…
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Compound Interest For Marketing
Long ago, I freaked out when I read one of the first quarterly statements regarding the performance of my 401k. I was ALREADY LOOSING MONEY! Thankfully, someone slapped me out of my panic and reminded me that financial investing is all about money growing over time… as in 2, 3, even 4 decades. The same…
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Unique Value Proposition = Never-ending Revenue Stream
#Marketing, #Brand and #Sales channels ARE your unique value proposition – not merely a way to communicate it! It is time to re-design them to reflect their true power of building engagement and future-proofing your business. What exactly do I mean? Engagement is a signal that audiences trust you, your messaging, and/or your brand. Sometimes…
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Consider Your Audience
Why do most marketing, communications, and sales pitches fail? They lack connection to the audience. Sellers try to stay in control of the conversation and present what they think are the most compelling reasons to buy. Often it is the same reasons to every audience. Before my sales career began; I spent a couple years…
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Blazing New Trails
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” People are the key to a 21st Century business. They are not a mere resource that needs to be managed. They are the most valuable asset to an organization and the driving force behind growing businesses. The job of…
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A Foundation for 21st Century Business
Whether we are ready to admit it or not; the way we do business today is different than it was 10, 5, even just 3 years ago. Buyers either seem to care about different things or care about things in a different degree. There are more competitors offering highly similar products and services. Consumers have…
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The Power Of Systems In Marketing
Contrary to beliefs throughout the industrial age; marketing and sales are not interchangeable words. Independently, they seem to be infinitely complex and divergent, but when blended together properly they blend create powerful synergies. Described separately and in overly-simplified terms; ‘Sales’ is about creating and maintaining a relationship that results in a transaction. ‘Marketing’ is about…
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Profit is not an indication of Growth
Profits are great! And quite easy to figure out. They are simply the monetary surplus left to a producer after deducting all expenses (wages, materials, rent, etc.) from the total income or revenues. This can be calculated per transaction about as easy as it can be for a given time frame (month, quarter, year). While…
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Theory of Abundance
We all want more abundant lives, businesses, and careers. We seem to think of this word only as a good thing, but I have discovered that abundance applies to everything – the good, the bad, and the mediocre. Without getting too metaphysical or philosophical; I’d like to share my thoughts on how each of us…
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Imagination and Belief; Missing Elements in Business
The business world is changing; and I think is is safe to say that we all know and recognize this. The first stage of change is always a decline. As we try new things, we slow down a bit, make errors, learn a lot, and make rapid adjustments that eventually level the decline. As we…
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A Carpenter’s Perspective on Building Business
I have always been handy with tools. Combine that with a strong sense of curiosity to understand that I easily adopted a DIY mindset early on in life. It began by taking things apart after they had ceased ‘working properly’ to study the innards and how they were assembled. As my knowledge and skills increased;…
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Advice For College Students
Yesterday I was fortunate to participate in my 3rd Sales Alumni Panel at University of Louisville College of Business. 6 other Alumni gave their morning to share wisdom, advice, and experiences to attentive students about to graduate. My 3-minute story began with… “I remember this program when I took this class and how the panelists…
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Pushing Boundaries of Innovation
In late 1890s Henry Ford was trying to get his automobile company funded. Though they already existed; he had innovative ideas that pushed the boundaries of most people’s imagination. He was laughed at and told that people didn’t want automobiles or quadracycles – they wanted faster horses. Many would-be investors mocked his ideas and labeled…
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Dare to be bold
There is a common old saying that tells us squeaky wheels will eventually get the oil they need. But in today’s technologically-driven world, our ears are bombarded with dings, buzzes, chirps, and audible reminders that we are likely to think that squeaky marketing is somebody’s custom ring tone and are likely to ignore it altogether.…
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Traditions
Over the holidays, we often take time to reflect on what is important to us and share in a variety of traditions; a particular meal only served once-a-year; curling up on the couch to watch a holiday movie at 2:00 pm; the way we decorate the house; and the opening of gifts. Like the holiday…
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Illuminate Sales
Many businesses sell a commodity item – something that has ‘one hundred and one’ of uses, or ‘that everybody needs’. There is a portion of your audience who will buy it because it is available, and a portion who buy it with a specific use in mind. Let’s say it is a candle. If you…
David R Frick 