While all the cool kids are doing start-ups, I’m doing a “stay-in”. That is, I am staying in business after 28 years at it. Just in case you might be wondering, here is one of AnnMaria’s first rules of “stay-in” businesses. Not all work is created equal Not only that, but some of it is…
I have a confession to make. As a sixteen-year-old college freshman, I had no idea what people in business did. As a nineteen-year-old college graduate, with a BSBA, I didn’t know much more. My more affluent classmates had internships in the summer. My scholarship covered my tuition and sometimes room and board but left a…
COMPLETELY RANDOM THOUGHTS on business sparked by twitter…. I live just south of Malibu, a city filled with the type of houses God would have built if he only he’d had enough money. Often, I’ll take the afternoon off and go hiking in the Santa Monica mountains, peeking into the backyards, tennis courts and golfing…
Three times within a very short period I have seen technology offerings that I thought were an epic fail. In one case I was a beta tester, in one, a regular user and in the third a personal friend of the founder. All of them, I thought, had brilliant ideas that fit a real need…
I am pissed. As a small business owner, I am feeling very, very disappointed that there is certainly some law out there that would impose penalties if I drove on over to Riverside County and bitch-slapped Darrell Issa. I’ve grown cynical enough in my old age and after having run a small business since 1985…
I watched Black in America: Silicon Valley, The New Promised Land with Soledad O’Brien on the accelerator for black entrepreneurs. It was a terrific show and I highly recommend it. An interesting comment was made by one of the venture capitalists when O’Brien asked him why a white, wealthy male like him cares about diversity…
<- On the lake shore last night It wasn’t until a banker sneeringly said to me, “So, you’re a lifestyle business.” That I realized lifestyle business was not, as I had mistakenly thought, people who called themselves “life coaches” , Mary Kay consultants, personal trainers, financial consultants or other businesses that are telling you what…
Working on project for a new client and I was thinking about how we get work, which is a question I get asked all the time both from consultants and people interested in entering the consulting business. It may be a self-fulfilling prophecy that we have received very little work from the latest marketing innovations…
I read an interesting blog post by Jason Cohen of Smart Bear, “Do I dare call bullshit” and my comment was so long and my week is so filled, I thought I would just go ahead and repeat the comment here as my blog for today. I certainly post things that piss people off from…
“How do you get business?” I get asked this a lot, and since I doubt random people I meet at conferences are truly interested in my life, I think what they really want to know is: “How can I get business as a consultant?” I’ve been working as a consultant for over thirty years. Here…