Category Archives: lateral thinking

Remember – Your Best Customer Is . . . Your Best Customer

As a small business entrepreneur, a primary goal is to find new customers, and it’s one of the best ways to grow a business.   You must walk a fine line, though, keeping your current customers happy and eager to continue buying from you, at the same time as you dig for new customers.  All the…Continue Reading

Scaling Your Small Business’ Revenue

This 2-part series of articles explores the difference between growing and scaling the revenue in your small business.  Part 2 explains revenue scaling, which is an often-confused term, but in our context here it refers to your ability to increase revenue without increasing resource costs (or increasing resource costs at a lesser rate). Many small…Continue Reading

Revenue – Growth vs Scaling In Your Small Business

This is Part 1 of a 2-part article series – and explores some thoughts and cautions about growing revenue in a very small business.  Part 2 discusses ideas for scaling your revenue.  These are two very different things:       Like many others, my small business started out as a one-person operation, and deficient…Continue Reading

Business Plans, Luck, Serendipity, and Re-Inventing the Company

  “Serendipity – The faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.“ Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary If you play it right and are always on the lookout, serendipity can play a very large part in the successful running of a small business.  Many people call it luck, and that’s an OK word…Continue Reading

Strategic Alliance Partners

“Alliances have become an integral part of contemporary strategic thinking.”                                                     Fortune magazine Strategic alliances can be extremely important for small businesses.   As I’ll illustrate in a couple of paragraphs, forming strategic alliances was key to my…Continue Reading

Thinking Outside The Box (a.k.a. Lateral Thinking)

“Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic.” In my last blog post I urged small business owners to break out of their comfort zone.  One really good way to do…Continue Reading