Articles
Browse every published article connected to Melanie Benson Strick, with exact attribution and full-archive search.
Articles
Browse every published article connected to Melanie Benson Strick, or search within this exact expert archive.
When you’re too busy, it has a negative impact on all facets of your life. Those of us in the entrepreneurial world have a tendency to think about the negative aspects of busyness in terms of how it makes running our businesses harder. If we expand our perspective of the problem, it becomes readily apparent that much, much more is really at stake.
Have you ever felt like you were running a rat race? Everything seems like it takes forever, costs 10 times as much as you expected and you still feel like you are a million miles away from achieving your financial goals? That’s because people often approach their financial growth with the ...
7 Keys to Identifying an Ideal Partnership In the world of small business, it seems there is often a common quest: to find the ideal business partner. Usually this stems from a need to “get rid of” the roles or tasks that we struggle with. Like marketing, finance or sales. I know when I first ...
I was talking with a colleague the other day about their business. Like me, their ideal client already has an established business and knows they want to grow through scalable strategies and automation. As we were bouncing around some ideas of where those clients are I asked him, “Do you think you’ve lost some ideal clients along the way who could benefit from your system but left anyway?” The answer was “Of course…but I don’t know how to reach them.”
I was coaching a client one day who was feeling rather overwhelmed with trying to launch her new idea. I invited her to start a process of writing down all of the responsibilities, projects, tasks and other “shoulds” that she had swimming around in her mind. When she called in for her next coaching session, I asked her how many things she had on her list. She had filled four pages of stuff that had to get done—right now! As we went through her list the problem became crystal-clear, and it’s what I call the Multiple Train Syndrome. This is why running your business alone doesn’t work.
Once in a while I run into a paradox in life – when in order to achieve something I have to do what feels like the total opposite. Recently I’ve discovered that in order to achieve a certain type of success I’ve had to stop focusing on solving the problem and surrender into it. Now the first time this concept was revealed to me I rejected it completely. I had up to that point defined much of my success on my innate ability to see a problem, find all the possible ways to solve it, pick the best solution and get into action. I am a problem solver!
John had a dream. He wanted to live his passion and make a difference in the world. He knew that self-employment was a key to creating wealth and freedom. So John set out to be the owner of his own business. He did everything right. He watched what other successful people were doing. He modeled their behavior, their choices and implemented their strategies for success.
I’ve been seeing a lot of “information” lately about being a leader or a follower. What I’ve come to understand is a lot of mentors, gurus and marketers need you to be a follower. Followers do what they are told. Which means followers will probably spend a lot more money with their “guru” and will implement exactly how they are told. Which means the “gurus” ego can be stroked, so they can capture the followers success and convince a lot more followers to buy. I’m sorry but I just can’t get on board with that.
After years and years of building my business I know it’s a heck of a lot more fun (and a lot less work) to raise a vision when you have a village of people supporting you! I’ve always had a team. To me that’s a no-brainer. But sometimes I lose sight of the other important “villagers” I need to help me stay connected to my vision. Here are some of the “villagers” that I turn to for support: 1. A Mentor Coach: Having someone in your corner who will help you see all the possibilities is essential to achieving your vision this year.
As an entrepreneur we are trained to focus on results – make more money, get more clients, sell more products, and achieve more recognition. It becomes easy to let these hard numbers dictate our daily levels of success, happiness, and even survival.
As entrepreneurs our business is a HUGE part of our lives. We spend every waking hour thinking about how to grow our results and often invest more time nurturing our business than we do our intimate relationships.
Do you have all your revenue eggs in one basket? It’s the classic situation many entrepreneurs find themselves in – and it’s a precarious place to operate your business from. If you have one big client, one main offering or one key industry that provides you most of your revenue, then you have left yourself vulnerable to many forces you can’t control. Knowing this, many entrepreneurs strive to diversify their income with information products, the “funnel of offerings” or spread themselves to thin into many different industries.
5 Bad Habits That Are Sabotaging Your Business Goals Early on in my career as an entrepreneur I quickly realized that habits had a huge impact on my results. And boy oh boy are there a lot of bad habits that sabotage results. For some, it’s just not knowing any better. For others, self-sabotage habits keep you safe from facing your greatest fear about becoming successful. I’d like to see you really become a huge success. You deserve it. And heck, I’m pretty sure that whate
Six Ways to Conquer The Isolation Blues I’ve been working from a home office for over 15 years. During my corporate career I was one of those renegades who had to use an old clunky dial up modem so I could replicate my office at home. When I started my own business, I knew I would be 100 times more productive by just walking 10 steps to my in-home office. But after a while I found myself feeling the blues kick in after too much isolation. Working from home is a double-edge
Liquid Time: The Secret to Getting It All Done How many times do you end your day with this thought: “Wow I didn’t get anything done” – even though you were busy all day! So what’s going on that causes you to never actually get to your massive to-do list? Obviously your day ran you, instead of you running your day. Don’t worry, it happens to the best of us. You probably got interrupted with a billion issues – clients called, your team had questions, something blew up and you