Posts Tagged ‘entrepreneurs’
Are You Ready To Tell People About You?
Have you ever come away from being asked the, ‘so, tell me about you’ question in a professional setting and felt like you nailed it—even just a little bit? How do you sum up the essence of who you are, what you stand for and what you’re capable of without sounding like an over-rehearsed egotist,…
Read MoreFreedom Is Something You Make
When I was growing up (and maybe when you were too), there were two ways you could earn a living. You could have a job, or have a business. Two clear choices, work for a boss, or be the boss. Career guidance advice went something like this… “Get good grades, to get a qualification, to…
Read MoreWhat Are Your Customer’s Triggers?
We mostly think of buying as an isolated act, something our customers do in the moment. But it’s probably more useful to think of buying as a behaviour. A behaviour is an action or reaction which is triggered and conditioned. We look in the fridge at 8pm and notice that we’re running low on milk,…
Read MoreNo Business Is In A Market Of One
When dance partners compete they know the other couples are there on the dance floor with them, but they never focus on what the competition is doing. Instead they relentlessly hone each move and perform it for the audience as if it were their only chance to dance the dance. They don’t allow the fact…
Read MoreWhoever Gets Closest To Their Customer Wins
Let’s consider how the business world has been turned on its head in less than a decade. We only need to think about fourteen brands in order to understand the shift. APPLE vs. SONY. AMAZON vs. BORDERS. NETFLIX vs. BLOCKBUSTER. AIRBNB vs. HILTON. UBER vs. CABS. NEST vs. HONEYWELL. TWITTER vs. NEWS CORP. It turns…
Read MoreEmpathy Is The Killer App
One of the reasons that upstart companies like GoPro have been able to steel a march on their much better resourced competitors like Sony, has been their ability and efforts to develop products for their customers by truly understanding who those customers are and what they want. It’s not possible to create products, services or…
Read MoreHow To Write Your Mission Statement And 20 Great Mission Statements To Inspire You
Have you ever noticed how we tie ourselves up in knots and overcomplicate things when we put our business hats on? Your mission statement doesn’t need to be long and complex, it’s simply a promise—your statement of intention. A mission statement needs to clarify the answers to the following two questions: What do you do?…
Read MoreWhere Wile E. Coyote Went Wrong
Do you remember those old cartoons where Wile E. Coyote is so focused on outsmarting The Road Runner that he inevitably ends up getting in his own way? He spends so much time and energy trying to be one step ahead of the bird that he forgets what his end goal was. It’s easy (and…
Read MoreHow Disruptive Innovations Happen At The Edges
Think of any business that’s succeeded over the past two decades and especially the upstarts that have left incumbent brands on the back foot. Kodak vs. Instagram, Sony vs. Go Pro, Hilton vs. Airbnb, cab companies vs. Uber, banks vs. Paypal, Borders vs Amazon, Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Chubb vs. Canary and on and on and…
Read More3 Essential Marketing Questions
As marketers we invest a great deal of time and money working out how to tell the story of our products. But if we can agree that marketing is giving people something to talk about, why aren’t we using resources in equal measure to do that. What if we began with a new set of…
Read More