Meet the board you could never afford™
One of our natural and most beautiful gems is formed when an individual grain of sand infiltrates an oyster. This irritant is dealt with not by expulsion but rather a patient approach of layering the grit with a white substance that relieves the irritation, allowing the pearl (something that is then highly regarded) to be [...]
When business is tough, as it is now for most people, the sound business advice is to go back to basics and keep your core business intact. Sage advice indeed but what do you do if your core business is in fact beyond recovery or you are no longer inspired to ensure it does recover? [...]
So goes the saying, but you would think it might do if you looked around you sometimes. Stamina and energy are great dividers amongst those that have it in abundance and those that don’t. My first boss once told me it was the ability to keep going when all around you were failing that gives [...]
It’s common practice in professional service businesses to give away a certain amount of free advice as part of an initial consultation. This may partly be to clarify needs but is often part of the sales process I’m engaging with the client. The difficult part for the adviser is knowing when to a stop with [...]
If you’ve read Andrew Morris’s and Phil Shipperlee’s articles on the most important things in business, you may already have arrived at the conclusion that there’s no definitive correct answer as really successful businesses need much more than simply two or three key drivers. I’m almost with Andrew on his three but not quite and [...]
I have two points that I would put at the top of my list of ‘the most important things in business’ …but before going into them, I would like to set the scene. Having spent much of the past 31 years’ starting and running my own businesses, my views are strongly influenced by the experiences [...]
IDEAS: Separate the ‘inventor’ from the implementation. The person behind the project is rarely effective at completing and finishing Prepare realistic ‘crawl-out costs’, revenue expectations and deadlines. You need to be ready to ruthlessly walk away if the idea doesn’t bear fruit. An aborted idea will reduce morale and confidence. So make sure you capture [...]
Creating and developing a successful business is the goal of every budding entrepreneur and for over 25 years Andrew B Morris has been doing just that; in his role as CEO of the Academy for Chief Executives he is often asked ‘what are the most important things in business’; in this article, Andrew reveals his [...]
The toughest professional questions to members of the Academy for Chief Executives come primarily from just three areas. They’re asked by customers, prospects and your own employees. How do we know this? The information comes from the pre-session surveys that I’ve been conducting with members before sessions on “Give Great Answers To Tough Questions”. So [...]
Gone are the days of stability when you could develop a strategy and confidently plan the growth of your business over a five-year period. We are now living through a different period of history–a period that is marked by unanticipated events with regional and global impacts on business. Events such as the economic crash of [...]