Business Partner blueprint

  This is the second in our “Pathway to Your Success” series where we walk you through issues such as: corporate contracts versus government contracts; how do you use corporate contracts for legacy business growth, and what does that mean; what do large companies buy; w the time is now for small business owners to get into this game, and how to go about financing your business so that you can play to win. What is the opportunity that corporate procurement versus government procurement presents? What really is the smartest choice for you to sell your products right now? Corporate procurement; government procurement; retail; or direct to customer now that you’re thinking about a legacy business, sustainable growth, and something that will sell for a good multiple of earnings or profit. The biggest challenge that small business owners have is that you build these businesses, but they never sell for what you think they should sell for. You probably have an idea in mind of what you'

  This is the first in the “pathway to your success” series -- helping you to discover the small-business growth opportunity with the biggest companies in the world. We'll cover various issues like corporate contracts versus government contracts; how to use corporate contracts for legacy business growth; and what does that mean? What do large companies buy, and why the time is now for small business owners to get into the big corporate contracting game. We’ll also discuss how to go about financing your small business so that you can play and win in this game and, of course, the mindset for success. This blog is about legacy and giving back -- the small business owner’s dream. What I want to discuss is why did you start your small business - or why are you thinking about starting your small business? You get past the obvious things rather quickly: “I can make some money”; “I'm fed up with my nine to five”; or “I want to be my own boss”.   Many of you have wanted to have the

  In past episodes of this opportunity series, w e discussed Apple announcing a billion-dollar construction project. We discussed wearables; technology; the jobs report; drones; and people moving from one region to another. W hat I hope you've been coming away with is you just need to look at the business pages and see what's going on in the news. You should see opportunity everywhere.  As an example, a couple of years ago an article about a building supplies company in the US appeared in the newspaper. The company actually supplies a lot of construction materials, home remodeling equipment, light fixtures, appliances and different things you can use to remodel your home. Mostly do it yourself jobs, but they also have a portion of their business where building contractors come in and purchase supplies. Interestingly, they made an announcement that they planned to hire 65,000 people. This was an article that delineated the company’s plans. Let's look at some of the details

This is a continuation of the opportunity series. Here I will be discussing opportunities found in the US jobs report. The most recent jobs report showed that, in the USA, over 900,000 jobs were added in the last period. That's huge. We went through a period where we were only adding a fraction of jobs in a period and then 900,000 jobs in this last period. In the US we have what's called the labor participation rate, and the labor participation rate measures how many available adults are actually gainfully employed -- which is different from the unemployment number. Pre-pandemic, the labor participation rate was at a historic 72 percent. Typically, the US will hover in the mid-to-high sixties, but at that time we were at an unprecedented 72 percent -- meaning that 72 percent of all working-age people are getting jobs and we are getting well beyond full employment. Post-pandemic it appears that we are on pace to achieve and exceed our previous historic high.  We actually have a

  This is a continuation of our Opportunity Everywhere series. I am going to focus on opportunities created by drones. In my last blog I discussed wearables. By discussing these products, my intent is to really open your mind up to the idea that you should be able to pick up the newspaper and see an opportunity for your business every day. Don’t get trapped into the mindset that you have to always look for a specific thing. Yes, that's good - - you always want to stay focused. You want to always make sure that you're capitalizing on what you do best because that's leverageable. It builds on your core, it helps you with your competitive differentiation. Doing what you do best is a huge formula or ingredient for success, but you may be missing some great opportunities that are not within the parameters of your exact search. How do you really analyze what's going on in the business environment right now so that you can present what you do best to businesses that, at the

  This is a continuation of the series about how to land big corporate clients. Let us review items in the news and talk about opportunity. Let us change the question of “does opportunity exist” to “where should I look for opportunity and how do I identify it”? That's right – the question is never “is there opportunity?”. It is always an issue of “how do I recognize opportunity? How do I spot it? How do I know if it's something that I should be looking for?”  So, once again, this is about acquiring a mindset and skill set -- becoming a more savvy at spotting opportunities for your business -- or more precisely, building a robust sales pipeline.  Let’s look at Apple for an example of how to spot opportunity. Recently, Apple announced a $1 billion project for a campus in Austin, Texas. $1 billion is a lot of money, and there will be considerable suppliers that will benefit from this investment in Texas. Now you might say, “well, that's great, but that's not helping me.

  We have already delved into the first two pillars of building a legacy business: Be Yourself - and Be The Best. My focus in this post is on the third : “deliver, deliver, deliver”. In my opinion and my judgment, these are the three things that really matter, and they matter regardless of whether you are a woman or a man. They encompass the mindset, the attitude, the body of work, the way you set your business up, your approach to business. These are the three success factors that - once you have these down - you'll never look back. I am hoping that you have already learned some things that you can implement in your business almost immediately. In your next interaction with anybody from a corporation, these things should come across and the person just senses and feels in you that you are the person with whom they need to do business. Let me start by sharing a short story.   We won't be long on this topic, as you should already know the point of the story. A mechanical

  This is part three of our series on Women in the Boardroom.   In the last two blogs I presented the three main things that I believe are relevant to this topic: being yourself; being the best; and deliver, deliver, deliver. We also discussed debunking some of the perceptions out there and how to finesse those. Now we're going to get in-depth about being the best. What do I really mean by being the best? Well, let's a journey. It will have twists and turns. We're going to go over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house and back, but trust me, we have a destination in mind. I'm going to pull three major concepts together in order for you to really get a good picture of what it means to be the best in the corporate context. Compare the rental car companies Avis and Hertz. Hopefully you recall the commercials from years back where Avis had a series of commercials emphasizing the motto “we try harder”. Basically, Avis was saying that they understoo

  In the last blog I talked about “Women in the Boardroom -- the Truth”, and the response was amazing. It ranged from, “Hey, that was great information. I like the fact that you kept the three major points simple around being the best, be yourself and deliver, deliver, deliver”; to “You are a guy, you don't know what you are talking about. You have no idea what it is like for women in the boardroom“ (I knew that one was going to come). The most interesting one was “well, yeah, the three points you raised, those are so obvious. I didn't get anything out of it”.   Let's go back and take each one of those three points individually and give some backdrop to them. The first thing is we know there is a huge effort to create opportunity for everyone regardless of gender, age, race, creed, academic background, religious background, sexual orientation, etc. Businesses are trying to say, “look, we are a gender-blind, colorblind, religion-blind place where we embrace diversity and i