The Best Idea Ever: Has your great idea ever gone sour? You're not alone.

January 2012

You wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, bolt out of bed, and head for your notepad (or fire up your computer) to jot down the best business idea that has ever been theorized. Yeah, you and a million other people.

Don't let this get you down. Millions of Americans think of the most unbelievable ideas—such as the remote control hair dyer or the lip balm supposedly attracts the opposite sex. The reality is that almost none of these ideas come to fruition, not because they’re not truly good ideas, but because the visionary behind the idea generally does not have the skills, drive, or resources to actually make it come to life.  Click here to read more...



Use Your Time Wisely

November 2011

As a business owner you get pulled in many directions and you have to be selective of how and where you spend your time. Time is money, and as we all know, it is a finite commodity. As a result, you need to choose carefully when making decisions to make sure that your time is well spent, from making sure you are networking in the right places to carefully aligning yourself with the right partners. Time wasted is money ill-spent.

On this note, I recently had a book signing at Saks Fifth Avenue for my new book, The Everyday Entrepreneur. I was thrilled about the opportunity but uncertain about how valuable the experience would actually be. I attended with the best of intentions, to try and help entrepreneurs and those thinking about going out on their own become as successful as possible.  Click here to read more...



Do You Dress For Success?

October 2011

When I was in my early 20s and had very little cash on hand, I still tried to make sure I dressed the part of a young professional. I would scour the sale racks to find appropriate suits, dress shirts, and acceptable shoes to wear to ensure I was presentable and even maybe a notch above my potential employer or client. I wanted to make sure I looked the part.

Why would anyone want to admit to being a conformist? Well, there is a certain truth to looking, feeling, and playing a part to get what you want in this country. Call it superficial, but it’s a reality. Click here to read more...



Down Economy? Get Smarter Marketing to Stay Ahead

August 2011

I always thought I was a good marketer. I used all the tools I had at my disposal and I was always able to make a splash in my market. I recently realized that while I did most of it right, I failed a bit when trying to put it all together in a cohesive fashion to create the biggest return on my investment.

While I am a good planner, I was missing some pieces that I always thought would just magically fall into place. Needless to say, that rarely happened. Some campaigns we ran caught on like wildfire, other languished in obscurity. We also struggled to track the sales that were a direct result of our marketing campaigns as opposed to sales that gradually came about as a result of our branding efforts. Just recently we partnered with a local Sir Speedy—a printing and marketing company—to leverage their ability to create and manage large scale campaigns for small businesses on a budget. Even though I was adept at using technology and web-based media, I was pleased to find out about other comprehensive and systematic approaches to closing deals and growing revenue by harnessing simple but advanced technology.  Click here to read more... 



Decisions, Decisions

July 2011

I had just opened my first office for Advantage Payroll Services - well, if you could call it an office. It was literally in a storage room in an office building. I used several boxes, a discarded table and whatever office chairs had accidentally been left behind for my fledgling operation. We managed to bring quite a few clients on service in the first six months, none of which were invited to visit my storage - I mean, office space.

Getting started in any business is exasperating and exciting. There are hundreds of decisions that need to be made. Some are urgent, some are important and some are both. The hard part is deciding which decisions need significant time and focus to be made properly and which can be made rather quickly. Logically, we can see that deciding on what color pen you should use today is low on the significance scale, but I have seen, and probably made, bigger decisions - like what products should be offered - just as hastily.  Click here to read more... 



3 Surefire Ways to Better Relationships

June 2011

Running my fledgling operation from a basement storage facility in 1996 gave me great discomfort, but nearly 15 years later, I can appreciate the progress we have made that much more. Like most budding entrepreneurs, I spent most of my time multi-tasking to the maximum while playing a sales guy and customer service rep simultaneously. This left little time to devote to building relationships and I struggled to make consistent contact with people that mattered to me.

Even when I worked long into the evening, which I still do occasionally, I never had enough time to get to know people as well as I would have liked in the early stages of my organization. I was always chasing the next client, running to the next event, or putting out a fire. There were many fires, or more aptly stated, smoldering embers that I left untouched and unattended that could have been handled better.  Click here to read more... 



3 Employees You Need to Fire

March 2011

I was fired from a few jobs as a teenager. Fortunately, I also never had a problem getting a job. It was clear I was not the easiest employee to deal with. In my youth, I thought I knew better than my supervisors, the owners or basically anyone else in charge. One summer, when working in the kitchen of a pizzeria, I attempted to tell the pizza maker — with his 10 years of experience — how to do something better than the way he was doing it. He did not appreciate my input and tried to smack me with a spatula. Luckily he missed, but we did get into a shoving match right there in the kitchen.

Maybe I should have been fired for my insolence, or perhaps the pizza maker should have been let go for resorting to physical violence instead of taking my suggestion into consideration. The owner chose to keep both of us. Was his decision right or wrong? I am not looking for the legal answer — just a common sense one. The problem is that there is no right answer from a business owner’s perspective. Business owners make decisions based on their situation, which may or may not follow the letter of the law. I am not suggesting laws be broken, but sometimes a little massaging of reality is needed to keep a business afloat and moving in the right direction.  Click here to read more... 



Do You Forget to Celebrate the Small Stuff?

March 2011

Your first anniversary, the first steps your one-year-old took, the signing of your first home mortgage, your first kiss. These are all milestones we celebrate throughout our lives - but why? Is it our constant need for a sign of progress or our love of celebration? Could it simply be the human condition we move forward in our lives in search of some sort of meaning and affirmation of our accomplishments? Milestones, goals, or hurdles we overcome exist in every society across the globe and they seem to appear to be more ambitious as the universe gets older.

Your new business can be linked to when humans were living in caves and without fire. It’s sometimes in disarray and fighting for its existence without the proper tools to make it work as well as you would like. But somehow it plods forward just like humans through our evolutionary and socialization march towards modern living. The cave men had a milestone, albeit they may seem more modest by our standards, they were no less important to their very life than the milestones we reach.  Click here to read more... 



Dude, What’s My Brand?

February 2011

Your glowing red tie that everyone can see from across a busy city street, the gleaming white smile, the perfectly pressed suit or designer pumps, the fancy name badge you always wear to try and stand out, the robust strides you take when you enter a room that creates an air of confidence are just not enough to build your personal brand anymore. There will certainly always be a place for the Fuller Brush salesperson approach and some may be fooled by pomp and circumstance, but today’s buyers are savvier than ever and they want substance.

I remember buying my first business suit at Today’s Man when I was 21 and being so proud and confident that I could actually look the part of a successful person. I felt like a million bucks, but in reality I looked like $124.95 off the sale rack. No one was impressed. I quickly learned that playing the part was not nearly enough. I needed to be able to deliver for my prospects and clients to earn the respect and credibility I needed to grow my business and advance my own skills.  Click here to read more... 



When the Going Gets Tough, What Do You Do?

December 2010

You can hear the wind buzzing past your ears through the visor in your helmet. The engine rumbling from below vibrating and shaking your hands until your throttle hand becomes nearly numb. You can smell the fresh air mixed with the exhaust from the cars in front of you. You click through the gears, first gear, 30 mph click, second gear, 50 click. Now you’re humming at 60 mph, and you let your mind wander just for an instant in the enjoyment of the open road.

Suddenly you see a flash of steel in front of you, no time for the brakes; you hit the side of a car that made a left turn in front of you with no warning. The bike thuds to a grinding halt, your legs break as you sail over the car and the bottom of your chin scrapes across the roofline, breaking your jaw into pieces. Flashing lights, investigating police forces, the rush of ambulances, the whirl of the helicopter blades over head, and the sound of the defibrillator winding up, “Clear!”.  Click here to read more... 



Falling From Grace- Why Integrity Matters

November 2010

We have all seen famous people fall out of favor in the world’s eye. Tiger Woods with his so-called sex addiction, Richard Nixon with Watergate and Roger Clemens with his steroid use. But you don’t have to be world famous to end up being a pariah. You can be the corner deli owner, the local politician or the civic leader in your community. Riding high on public sentiment feels good and feeds every human’s ego, but too many times people forget that once you breach trust and act without integrity, it all comes crashing down like Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

I can clearly recall several instances in the regional marketplace where individuals lost their status and cache because of their own actions or - better described - their own lack of integrity. For example, a regional business owner who ran an organization and appeared to have the community at his feet was suddenly removed under a cloud of suspicion. Shortly after his removal, information surfaced that he was the leader of a venture that cleaned out their investors as a result of shady dealings. Or high profile individuals who are consistently being heard in the marketplace talking negatively about prominent professionals to self aggrandize themselves. Did they simply wake up one morning and lack the integrity they once had? Probably not. Don’t let the fact that people like this seem well-connected; the fact is those supposed business contacts don’t trust them either. In many instances those business friends are just worried that they will talk negative about them to other people so they put up with polite public acknowledgments. 

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How Ozzy Osbourne Can Help You Grow Your Business

October 2010

"I've listened to preachers, I've listened to fools, I've watched all the dropouts. Who make their own rules, one person conditioned to rule and control. The media sells it and you live the role “

Wow, heady stuff. This quote is not from some poet, valedictorian of your high school class or some quick witted socialite…it was Ozzy Osbourne. Yes, the same man that is purported to have bit the heads off of bats and generally cause chaos.

You might look at a character like Ozzy and think that you don’t have anything in common, but I bet we all have a bit of Ozzy in us. He was the greatest expression of himself that he knew how to be. I would not suggest you take on some of his behavior to get your business to the next level of success, but I would say that you need to be the best expression of YOU that you can be. Entrepreneurs and successful business owners always seem to get in their own way and put road blocks in place that are unnecessary and counterproductive to growing a winning enterprise.  Click here to read more... 



3 Reasons Why a Business Plan is Essential

September 2010

Cool air rushes in, traveling down your trachea, tightening your diaphragm, expanding your lungs, filling every corner of your bronchial tubes and alveoli. Capillaries exchange oxygen for the carbon dioxide that pushes its way out of your lungs, back through your windpipe and out into the air that surrounds you.

Your heart works to deliver this oxygen to each of your fifty trillion cells as the process is repeated over, and over again. This amazingly complex combination of involuntary reflexes is what keeps us energized, focused, alive, and yet it is described with one single word- breathing.

We don’t have to think about breathing, it just happens -so why do Zen masters and medical doctors urge us to control and regulate our breathing? Because breathing is the foundation of everything else in our lives, affecting everything we do.  Click here to read more... 




5 Tips to Hitting the Mark in Marketing

August 2010

When I drove an ice cream truck in college, I used signs on the side of the truck to promote any specials I was running. It was amazing how selling smaller items, such as lollipops, added substantially to my bottom line. I sold a lot of lollipops, but I also increased my ice cream sales at the same time. Now that I own a payroll company, it’s only natural that I offer additional but related services to my clients.

The challenge, however, has been how to get the word out about these services in a cost effective way. The solution has been that I take a multi-faceted approach to the problem and the results have been rewarding.  Click here to read more... 



What’s Your Lollipop?

July 2010

One of my first entrepreneurial ventures was running an ice cream truck after I graduated college. I was looking for a professional job, but was having significant challenges and needed a way to pay the rent in the house I shared with five friends. I leased the ice cream truck, hit the streets two days a week, and hired a driver the other days so I could spend time looking for a permanent career path.

I had no idea what I was in for.

During the first week we inadvertently drove through another driver’s territory without realizing it. We were literally chased down by the rival driver- bells and music of both trucks blaring through the residential neighborhood leaving children disappointed and parents baffled as we sped by. We were reprimanded by the owner of the leasing company in a Soprano-esque style meeting where we were not-so-politely told the rules of the ice cream trade. 

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