I think you need to take more risks. A client of mine (first-time CEO) was asking me what she should do. Raising her “B round” of funding was harder than she expected, and she was getting tons of feedback from potential investors that a strategic pivot to a more familiar business model might make it…
BRYAN FRANKLIN
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Know When To Say F-It
9 years ago -
The real risk of being a CEO
9 years agoAs a first-time CEO, as your company grows and the work becomes more complex, and while you have a team to help you with this goal, you’ll notice that fundamentally there becomes two different kinds of jobs to do. The first job is to imagine new ways of growing the company, to forge new…
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Celebrity Death Match: Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, and The Dalai Lama vs. P.T. Barnum, Larry Page, and Calvin Coolidge
9 years agoI think every entrepreneur, at some point, has to face what side they are going to be on in the celebrity death match between leading based on your vision and leading based on your empathy for the needs of your market. On one side, we have Steve Jobs, who continually developed new products that the…
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Putting your website to work for you
9 years agoBefore we get started, let me just say this one thing … Your website will never be done. You should always be working to update and improve your online presence and evaluating how it is bringing you results (and even if it is bringing you the results you want). Given that, it’s important when you’re…
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You get what you measure (what are you measuring?)
9 years agoMost people think financial analysis means gathering all of the data about how every single penny is earned and spent in their business. For many of us, that feels like a very tedious and lengthy task. The experience I really want you to associate with financial analysis and planning, with really getting your metrics right…
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Three Factors That Motivate Your Customers to Buy
9 years agoIn last week’s article on “Why You Should Be Selling Emotions, Not Features”, we talked about how having in-person sales conversations can greatly improve your chances of learning what emotionally activates your customers. Today, I want to share with you more about how to evaluate your customer’s emotional landscape and what motivates them to buy….
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Why you should be selling emotions, not features
9 years agoMost entrepreneurs, when they’re developing their products and services, sit down in a vacuum of their own ideas and their own teams, trying to make their product better. They attempt to figure out what features would be the coolest and what they think people really want. But what if you knew how your customers…
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3 Myths About Success
9 years agoEntrepreneurs: Be careful what you wish for Last week, I recorded a webinar highlighting a new project that I am over the moon about. I had spent literally hours of preparation with the team making sure all the talking points for the webinar were the absolute best they could be and we had a…
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What I’ve learned from Silicon Valley strategic geniuses
10 years agoYou are already winning the game you are playing. Here’s what I mean. Your actions determine what field you are on, what position you are playing, and what the score is on the board. But for many of us, we are trying to score a touchdown on a baseball field. That’s because we have built…
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Are you giving yourself the wrong job?
10 years agoWhen you are the founder or CEO of a young company, and maybe you have 5 to 15 employees, the imperative is growth. It’s probably what you think about everyday, in every meeting, and the fundamental driver for every decision is, “how do we grow this company?” That is appropriate because, as a young…
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The Surprising Truth About Your Website
10 years agoA website is a tool. However, most people have no idea what they’re using the tool for. For most startup entrepreneurs, a website only serves the purpose of proving you’re legitimate. For example, if someone’s already heard about you in some other way, they go to your website to look around and learn more about…
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How to Make Your Business as Predictable as an ATM
10 years agoSo what’s sustainability? Sustainability is this: are you making enough to pay your bills and have some leftover to pay your taxes and a little bit for your savings account? From a financial standpoint, sustainability means your business is able to pay you and the other people in your company enough such that it’s profitable….
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Want Your Business To Fail? Here’s the Fastest Way to Make that Happen
10 years agoPeople say, kind of tongue-in-cheek, that the number one reason companies fail is not enough sales. But I’ve actually observed that the number one reason companies fail is they do things in the wrong order. Adventurous entrepreneurs, startups, and small business owners doing the one-on-one model often find it hard to create success in addition…
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The Value Mistake That Will Kill Your Company
10 years agoWhen working on the value equation for your business, you have to go out and ask people what they’re willing to pay for your product or service. The question most entrepreneurs ask is, “Hey, this is what I wanna offer at this price. Would you buy it?” Here’s the problem: you’ll never get an honest…
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3 Incredible Automated Systems that Will Transform Your Business
10 years agoYou’re leading your business. Your job is literally to work yourself out of a job such that leadership is the only thing that is left. Such that you’re only doing the steering. When you first start, it’s okay if you’re doing the steering while wearing three or four or five other hats. This is natural…
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If You Don’t Automate Now, You’ll Suffer Later
10 years agoI’ve spent a lot of time really studying the difference between super successful folks and people who struggle, because we always want to convert the strugglers into the success stories. One of the things that keeps coming up is that successful people solve every problem once, and unsuccessful people solve the same problem again and…
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Do Not Attempt to Scale Your Business Until You’ve Done This…
10 years agoA lot of entrepreneurs are biting at the bit to move forward with their business. They want to know, When can I scale? When can I scale? First of all, scaling means growing while maintaining the same shape. The difference between growing and scaling is this: While growing, you can make small additions, like adding…
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What Sexual Tension Can Teach Us About Project Growth
10 years agoOne of the things that we like to believe as entrepreneurs is that we have the Midas touch. There are probably some things that we’re really good at, like sales or marketing or developing product. And the more attention and focus that we place in the area of our own genius, the more fantastic results…
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Own Your Freedom and Power in Every Moment (Take Back Your Attention: Part Two)
10 years agoA couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about arrested attention. I got some emails with questions about the subject and people wanting to dig a little deeper. So today I’m going to briefly dive back in. My goal with these recent posts has been to give you a completely different understanding of freedom…
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I Shifted My Goal to Something WAY Bigger. You Won’t Believe How Things Changed
10 years agoWhat if you, as the entrepreneur, considered your own development and your ability to change as the ultimate object? In other words, what if changing yourself is really the goal and you picked an entrepreneurial path strategically because you know it’s going to present exactly the challenges you need to change yourself in exactly the…
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Are Other Influences Creating Your Reality? Take Back Your Attention
10 years agoIt’s important to understand that the power and ability you have to create in the world is amplified so much more by discussing deeper concepts than by always talking about how to get more traffic or how to get sales. So on that note, let’s talk about freedom and arrested attention. What Freedom and Arrested…
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Evolving Leadership Through Paradox
10 years agoWe’ve started doing this in the team, we’ve built a culture where everybody is starting to hold this paradox together with each other. So we know what each other’s genius is and we know what people are working towards and it’s just phenomenal, and then all of a sudden screw-ups, failures, none of that is…
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The Single Most Powerful Skill Every Entrepreneur Must Have
10 years agoI’ve noticed that the most powerful leaders hold paradox. What I mean by “hold” is that you can simultaneously experience the truth of each side of the paradox without reducing the truth of the other. Being able to do this is among the top components of power and success, if not the single most powerful…
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9 Surprising Tips from Peak Performing Entrepreneurs
11 years agoFor you entrepreneurs who are just getting started, I’ve gathered nine surprising tips from leading entrepreneurs. While these tips may be unexpected or even strange, rest assured these people have learned from experience. Number One: Health First Prioritize sleep and eat a healthy diet. This means eating high quality, non-processed food. You should even put…
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3 Cures for a Failing Business
11 years agoLast week I introduced you to the three early warning signs that your business is failing. The first one has to do with employee performance and metrics, the second one happens when you begin to view the customer as an obstacle, and the third concerns marketing mismanagement in your company. If you’re encountering these signs,…
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3 Early Warning Signs Your Business is Failing
11 years agoI’m always amused by the extreme measures that an entrepreneur is willing to make or to take when they start to feel like they’re failing. Suddenly all of the boundaries and norms just go right out the window. All the budgets and constraints go right out the window and an entrepreneur is really willing to…
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The Distinction Between Business Owner and Entrepreneur
11 years agoImagine a business owner and a entrepreneur walking together down a path along a riverbank. As they’re walking they see across the river this gorgeous Eden, this Mecca. Both of them are going to see opportunity over there and both of them will likely say, “We should build a bridge.” But here’s the difference. The…
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As a Leader, Am I Making Enough of a Difference?
11 years agoA little while back, Jennifer and I were on our way to an event we’re throwing for entrepreneurs where we’re going to be getting up on stage and talking about making a difference, and how each person should be maximizing the value that they are providing to the world, and that maximizing that value is the…
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How To Win Over An Intelligent Person
11 years agoWhen you’re up to big things, running an organization, committed to a big outcome, you often need to get agreement with other influential people and those influential people are usually intelligent. That’s how they became influential. And, chances are they have a slightly different worldview than you do. Sometimes that different worldview causes them not…