The Jobs-to-Be-Done framework has been a boon to my business and the businesses I work with daily. As a business strategist with nearly two decades of experience helping brands online and offline, one of the most disheartening occurrences I experience is telling business owners their...
In early June, a close friend and successful big-business consultant reached out for a mid-afternoon pep talk in advance of new product launch for his largest client. After nearly a year of work to get the product to the starting line, he sensed something was...
In the digital age, your personal brand is defined by your reputation (online and offline), your online profile and the content you share. By making it a habit to create and/or share best-in-class content and showing empathy by helping others do better at their jobs...
Helping Black-owned businesses, in addition to small businesses in general, has become a calling I didn’t see coming. I was a biology and psychology double major in college, with hopes of becoming an animal research scientist. However, a love for business, especially entrepreneurship, took me...
The key to a successful podcast is the host, not the guests. Amazing podcast hosts are facile interviewers able to pull the most pertinent information from subjects, even those who are interviewed frequently. If you want to become one of the best podcast hosts, focus...
Industry averages are important benchmarks used to help your small business make comparisons of key metrics to other businesses in your vertical. If you don’t understand industry averages for your business, it’s time to get educated on the numbers. An understanding of the topic can...
To get at the truth of how customers view your products or services, learn to ask the next question. As a newspaper reporter with no formal training, the most challenging part of my job initially was accosting people for interviews. Within a few weeks, however,...
Part of earning and keeping the attention of your audience is having them trust that you won’t waste their time with verbosity. If you’re looking to write tighter, allowing your brand to keep the attention of your audience, spend less time laboring over what to...
While I’m hopeful content marketers are working to extinguish the “content is king” nonsense from the vernacular, content is, nevertheless, important. It’s beneficial on our websites, in our outreach, in our presentations and in conversations, both online and offline. But if content is so important,...
Most small business owners focus on building a better product. They’d see better results by creating a differentiated product. Different is better when it comes to products and services in competitive verticals. It’s why one of my first tasks when working with small business owners...