Strategy, insight, and results for growing businesses
Most small business pricing is archaeology — a rate set years ago, adjusted by feel, defended by habit. Three case studies show how owners rebuilt their rates around value and made the higher numbers stick.
The most important conversation of any sales process is the one you are not invited to. Here is how to design your process around the objections your prospects never say out loud.
The most common early hiring mistake is not hiring badly—it is hiring familiarly. Founders gravitate toward people who resemble them, and the result is a company with one deep skill and three dangerous holes. A capability map fixes the order of hiring before growth makes the gaps expensive.
Recurring meetings are the largest unexamined line item on most growing companies' books. Here is a straightforward method for pricing your 'meeting tax'—and a repeatable audit that has helped firms reclaim a third of it without sacrificing alignment.
Every growing company eventually faces the same decision: when the founder pulls back, who runs the machine? Promoting your best revenue producer into the COO seat feels obvious — and is frequently the most expensive hire you never paid for. Here's a framework for getting it right.
Underpricing is rarely a math problem — it's a narrative problem. Five beliefs service business owners tell themselves, examined honestly, and what to do about each one before the quarter ends.
Most small businesses underprice not out of modesty but out of a distorted mirror — they see a vendor where the market might see a partner. Pricing is the loudest signal you send, and it is time owners treated their next rate change as a brand decision, not a spreadsheet exercise.
Promoting your top revenue producer into an operations role feels like rewarding excellence — but it often installs the wrong person in the most structurally demanding seat in the company. Here is a framework for evaluating readiness, and for handling the conversation either way.
Most small and mid-sized American businesses don't suffer from a shortage of ideas — they suffer from an unwillingness to abandon any of them. This piece argues that strategic clarity begins the moment a leader decides what the company will stop doing.
Every growing company hits the same inflection point: the founder's involvement shifts from asset to constraint. Here are the warning signs — and the specific, practical fixes for each one.