Being Self-Aware Enough to Know Your Value is the Path to Creating Exceptional Value
With people walking the Earth claiming to be the “greatest” at everything, it is easy to lose sight of your personal potential for greatness.
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When I think of personal greatness, I don’t mean the narcissistic “look at me, look how great I am” of an adult child clamoring for constant approval. A little limelight is good for the soul. Tying your sense of self-worth to the […]
The Power of Knowing Your Entrepreneurial Focus
It is very difficult to focus on a business mission and yourself at the same time. Clarity makes all the difference.
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“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Robert
Robert has somewhere between seven and a dozen small business ventures on the go at any time.
If he sees an opportunity or has an idea, he is quick to launch it. One of the businesses started out in managed information technology services. Then a client asked
if he could build her a […]
Going High to Access Alberta’s Ocean
Alberta wasn’t always landlocked. Now is the time to reimagine our competitive advantage.
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Alberta wasn’t always landlocked. Anywhere from 600 million years ago until 85 million years ago, give or take some rounding errors, the salt water of the ocean covered Alberta by varying degrees.
Then for 2 million years, Alberta went through about 80 glacial cycles. The last ice age finished about 10,000 years ago, bringing us to relatively modern times.
The federal government got elected […]
Stuck? Begin With the Start in Mind
Are you excellent at picturing the end-solution and then working backwards? There are times when that approach fails.
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As an entrepreneur, I can imagine, in great detail, a lot of possible things I could do or build. I’ve run into plenty of others in the same boat. Ideas are rarely in shortage.
Call it chasing the squirrel or the shiny blue ball syndrome.
The solution in most cases is to […]
Manage Your Brand: Win the Hearts of Customers
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People buy Apple products, because Apple has a powerful brand that connects to their ideal customer.
Consumers can see the connection to the iPhone in their hand or the MacBook Pro in their lap along with the company itself.
It doesn’t matter if the products are manufactured offshore by companies and people they don’t know exist. It doesn’t matter if the components in the phones are fabricated by other companies most of us have never heard of. […]
Win-Win Always Trumps Creating Losers
You don’t have to make people lose to win. In fact, it is usually a bad long-term strategy.
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“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.“ ~ Zig Ziglar
If you have been watching Donald Trump in the news lately, you are probably quite aware that he embraces an overt and aggressive bullying technique when dealing with any opposition.
Most recently, this included attacking the credibility of a disabled New York Times reporter […]
Why Having an Opinion Isn’t the Same as Thinking
Does the sheep really care that the lion doesn’t care about his opinion, and other challenges you’ve probably never considered.
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I’ve been challenging some commonly held beliefs (or memes) for a while. Often this conversation is in my head. Sometimes it is with clients and their beliefs about how their industry works. (I may even talk to myself when no one is around, but I am not aware of any proof.)
I was recently reading […]
Partnering Starts with Brand and Trust
Critical Parts of Successful Collaboration
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Over our last 15 plus years in business and consulting, I’ve run into many cases of small businesses attempting to work together to deliver better client value, win larger projects, and share marketing and sales costs.
This is one example of what it often looks like:
- Five to ten small firms targeting a similar target market form a marketing group or shell company.
- They all remain autonomous and […]
Stop Hoping For a Hero to Save You
As an entrepreneur, you have more problems than time. So you try to hand your biggest problems to someone else to make them disappear.
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We love our heroes.
In the movies, sometimes they start out as hero material, and sometimes they are reluctant heroes; forced into the role.
In sports, our heroes range from the all-star lineup of the favored team to the quarterback on the opposing side who leads the underdog team in a playoff run.
We want […]
How To Put Success Back Into Your Forecast
Here is the million dollar question: “What can Albertans and the oil and gas sector expect in 2016?”
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Some people have access to more data, but unless you’ve invented the time machine, your guess about the future might be just as good as theirs.
The Future Is Gloomy
(Update: Since this article was originally published in December 2015, the price of oil has dropped below $30 US per barrel and the royalty review results have been announced. Those […]