Coffee and Converse

If all you want to do once you hit that big revenue goal you're chasing is shut the business down, that doesn't seem like the best use of the time, money, and energy it will take for you to get there.Takeaways: Building a sustainable business requires balancing financial success with personal fulfillment and energy. Recognizing personal motivations for starting a business is crucial for long-term perseverance. Aligning your business goals with your core values avoids friction in daily operations. Embracing change as an opportunity helps entrepreneurs adapt and innovate despite market fluctuations. Continuous learning and personal development keep entrepreneurs engaged and prevent burnout over time. Setting operational and personal growth goals alongside revenue targets ensures a fulfilling business journey.

In the words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." When you realize your CRM is a system, not a software, it becomes infinitely more valuable.Takeaways: A CRM should encompass the entire customer journey, not just email marketing. It's essential to track all connections with potential leads, regardless of source. Many businesses overlook the data their CRM can provide beyond simple email engagement. Using a simple system like Google Sheets can be more effective than complex software. Understanding customer lifetime value is crucial for refining your CRM strategy. Most existing CRM systems fail to capture the full range of customer interactions.

SMART goals might be key to achieving results but they can also make you play small by limiting you to what feels attainable in a year. As you head for 2025, it's time to dream big before you set smaller goals.Takeaways: Setting a long-term vision for your business is crucial for motivating your team. Focus on expansive thinking for long-term success rather than just short-term revenue. Your vision should excite everyone in your business, not just focus on financial goals. Explore what opportunities excite you and align with your clients' needs for 2025. Ask yourself if your current goals are keeping you in your comfort zone. A compelling vision makes it easier to engage with your daily work and plans.

It's easy to get lost in the chase for your next business goal, only to reach it and wake up to find yourself feeling unfulfilled because you forgot to allow for personal growth alongside the business growth.Takeaways: It's essential to align your daily actions with your long-term vision and personal goals. Personal development should not be a neglected item on your to-do list; prioritize it. Color coding your calendar can visually reveal whether business or personal goals dominate. Reflect on your personal growth goals and evaluate how they contribute to your well-being. Work-life balance involves both time management and focus on personal development. Don't forget the reasons you started your business; they should guide your current actions.

We know we make an impact with our clients, but how can we make a bigger impact with our business even if we don't have the financial means right now?Takeaways: As entrepreneurs, we must consider how our core values influence our business impact. Finding a balance between financial success and making a positive impact is essential. We can create an impact without solely relying on financial contributions to causes. Our values remain consistent, allowing us to pivot our impact as we grow. Social responsibility can manifest in practices that enhance sustainability within our business. Engaging our community can amplify our efforts to make a difference in the world.

If we all became our own bosses to make our own rules and if we all know rest is essential to our performance, why is it so hard for us to escape the need to push or push through? And Q4 is this feeling on steroids!Takeaways: Taking a break can often lead to unexpected workload, as seen during my hiatus. Many self-imposed deadlines in small businesses can create unnecessary pressure to perform. It's crucial to assess the actual consequences of missing a goal by year-end. Burnout often starts subtly, revealing itself when you lose excitement for your work. Prioritizing work-life balance is essential for sustaining passion and joy in your business. Ask yourself how your current work-life balance will influence your success in 2025.

In a marketplace full of funnels, the business that thinks about what happens beyond the funnel wins the repeat business and raving fans competition.

You bank account is not an indicator of how much available cash you have in your business. Treating as such is going to have scary consqeuences down the line.Takeaways: Keep a close eye on your cash flow, especially during the high-spending Q4 season. Understand your current cash flow situation to ensure you can cover essential expenses. Plan for both personal and business expenses during the holiday season to avoid cash shortages. Assess your spending habits in Q4 to maintain liquidity for necessary investments next year. Establish a budget that accounts for both expected income and potential expenses in Q4. Create a strategy to maximize cash flow and ensure financial security for 2025.

Takeaways: Effective leadership involves empowering your team to make decisions and take risks without constant oversight. Self-assessment of your leadership style can reveal strengths and weaknesses, particularly under stress. Creating a safe environment for your team encourages experimentation and innovation, fostering resilience. Communication of the reasons behind changes is crucial for team buy-in and adaptability. Consider how your presence impacts creativity in meetings; leaders should inspire openness and safety. Model the behaviors you want to see in your team to nurture flexibility and responsiveness.

Marketing feels like an all-or-nothing kind of game for a small business. The reality it's an effectiveness game and the only way to win is to know your numbers.Takeaways: In marketing, it's crucial to focus on specific strategies rather than trying to do everything at once. Determine clear marketing goals, such as brand awareness or lead generation, to guide your efforts. Use data-driven insights from key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Contextualize KPI data with qualitative insights from customer feedback to better interpret results. Tracking and analyzing marketing data over time helps identify trends and improvements in your strategies. Avoid comparing your business metrics to others without considering the unique context and progress of your own efforts.

Your exit strategy touches every part of your business and every decision you make. Still, so many entrepreneurs ignore it to build how they feel in the moment not realizing that their opportunities are limited by this lack of planning.Takeaways: The podcast emphasizes the importance of having a clear exit strategy for your business. It's crucial to decide on your exit plan early, as it affects your business decisions. An exit strategy is not a decision you can make quickly or on a whim. Consider whether you aim to grow your business or optimize it based on your exit plan. The episode highlights three common exit strategies: closing, selling, or transferring ownership. Evaluate how your exit strategy impacts specific goals for the upcoming business quarter.

It's a bit of a business chicken and egg - you need revenue to have profit and you need profit to be able to invest to generate more revenue. But you also need to prioritize or you'll lose out on both.

Much liker gamers can lose entire days to chasing the next level, business owners can waste time, money and energy chasing a level they were never ready for to begin with.

When you feel off track in your business, you need to change course quickly and effectively before we've gone too far. But in the swirl of panic or the blahs of burnout, it can be hard to figure out how.

Chasing squirrels is fine as long as you don't chase on into a dead end or a disaster. So how do you measure your success as a squirrel hunter?

Our brains would explode if we had to deeply analyze every decision we need to make daily so we create little short cut to help us get there more quickly and with less energy. But sometimes those shortcuts are leading you up the garden path.

Online business has become its own little bubble and it can be easy to forget there's a whole world out there that impacts us. And that can lead to some less than fun surprises you might not be prepared for.

Without looking at your competitors, you have no information about your current market position to inform your pricing strategy. That's a data point that is readily available and you're wasting it

There is nothing new in the world but there can be different. Let's expand our definition of creativity in business.

We're an industry that prides ourselves on our sales and marketing metrics but that is only half the picture. If you're not measuring your operations, all that revenue could be dripping out the door and you're left with nothing in your pocket at the end of the day.

Just because you have the best idea for the thing your people really need, doesn't mean they'll want it and if they don't want it they won't buy.

Summer is a classic time for entrepreneur brains, free of the day to day grind, to come up with a miliion new small ideas. Imagine if you used that mental capacity to come up with one really big one instead.

Being able to assess where you have a skills gap or an attitude problem is a key skill for a small business leader. As your business grows, skills gaps are to be expected but attitude problems cannot be tolerated.

While Plan B might have felt like a lack of commitment when you were starting, not thinking through the risk in your established business is just irresponsible.

Software, apps and tech solutions run our online business and with more coming on the market daily, the marketing hype and affiliate fee driven advices is powerful. Make sure the you are investing in what your business needs and not just keeping up with the Joneses.

We should be pretty good at facing challenges as entreprenuers as they come with the territory. Unfortunately we're not great at being proactive about thinking through our behavior in the face of a challenge and that can lead us off course

Being cost efficient doesn't meant you cut your costs to the bone and struggle on. It means you get better at assessing where to spend

In a marketplace packed full of other businesses selling similar services to yours, how do you stand out? Not just to stop the scroll but to win the business

Long term success means a resilient business and resilience comes from diversifying how you can make money so that if one drops the others catch it.

The only thing more certain (and immediate) that death and taxes is change. And yet we always seem to be surprised when it happens and scrambling to adapt.

No matter how focused your goals are, if your implementation isn't just as focused, you'll waste time, money and energy.

Even smart goals can be silly when you set to many of them. Select fewer squirrel-proof goals and focus in one them to get further faster.

Reviewing your financials should be more that than the revenue goals you set in the past. Understanding the drivers of your financials will help you make better strategic decisions for the future.

Whether you like systems or think you hate them, you're using them day in and day out in your life and in your business so you might as well make them the most helpful systems you can.

A successful team is measured not only by their performance or hitting of goals and targets but in the way they did it.

We spend a lot of time working out how to market to people who might one day pay us. We need to spend at least as much time understanding how the people who have paid us experience those offers.

It's not enough to evaluate your current offers on their profitability alone. That only show us if they work externally. We need to consider if they work internally as well.

If you're the same leader you were at the end of last year you might need to try something new. As your business evolves, you, its leader, need to evolve as well.

If you're feeling burnt out and overwhelmed, you might need to focus more on joy in the second half of the year. It's easier than you think as you need surprisingly little joy each day to make you feel fulfilled and satisfied at work.

A mid-year business review is not just comparing your revenue number with half your revenue goal. Let's start with the baseline check up and go deeper from there.

Designing any new offer in your business needs to start with the end in mind to ensure that what you build can withstand the growth you're planning.

A budget is a strategic tool that helps you manage your whole business but it doesn't need to be as complex as you think it does.

Surprise and delight is such a newb strategy for your customer experience or journey. If you've not added anything since then, now's the time.

When CEOs get bored they start breaking things or chasing new ideas in the name of fun. What if instead, we introduced a little controlled fun with a passion project.

Stress is a constant companion for the small business CEO and we can stop seeing it for what it really is - a symptom of something that challenging.

No matter how clear and concise you are or how pretty your slide deck is or how many times you repeat yourself, you'll be wasting your breath if you don't start you communication strategy like this.

The problem with steamlining processs is that it sounds hard and dull and the pay off is boring old efficiency and cost saving. That's because you've been only been taught part of the streamlining process.

In a world of value stacks, charge your worth and just raise your prices, it's little wonder that the average small business owner is terrified of making the wrong move in pricing their offers. We need fewer slogans and more strategy

The number one reason I hear small business owners give for starting a business is freedom or flexibility. So if it is so important, why are we so bad at it?

When you feel torn between what you deserately want to do and what you know is the right move for your business, there are some simple check in you can use to make a strategic decision for you and the business.

Don't throw your business baby out with the bathwater because you got bored, had a fun idea or felt like burnout was creeping in.