How do you expect to finish if you never start?
Small businesses make up a very large portion of our economy here in America and it’s no secret that I’m a fan of entrepreneurs. There is a pride among the entrepreneurial community about their freedom and about their success (current or eventual) that they can’t help but speak about. Sometimes they even go so far as to say that’s the… Continue reading The Argument For (& Against) Entrepreneurship
Many of us have had to go through some sort of transformation in our lives. Maybe it is a personal ‘version upgrade.’ Maybe it is new career that made us grow. Maybe it is the healing of ourselves after a breakup. In any of these situations, we never just wake up and say, “Hello world! This is the new me,… Continue reading How Making Little Bets Will Make Us Big Winners
My recent 5 months have been filled with the struggles of an entrepreneur as I worked with my partner, Travis (Trav for short), on Epic Day Outdoors. We’ve gone through many iterations of the ‘business’ and just around the end of the year we parted ways (I use quotations here because we never technically made any money). We separated amicably… Continue reading 9 Startup Lessons I Learned
Crowd sourcing is a concept that has been around for a long time, but has become very popular in the past few years. Websites like IndiGoGo and KickStarter are sites that have become enormously successful (Kickstarter raising over $901M since inception) and trendy. So what can we learn from these businesses? A brief explanation for those that have no clue… Continue reading Crowd Sourcing: The Initiative to Clean Our Streets
We’ve all heard the expression, “Know when to cut your losses,” but that’s much easier said than recognized. Sunk costs are the monies invested on projects, ideas, people, or plans that never pan out. A half written blog post is an example of a sunk cost. We start and can’t finish the idea through so it’s left as a ‘draft’… Continue reading Sunk Cost – Knowing when to walk away
Expansion is a intense path to trek. Many companies talk today about ‘scaling’ (which is just a fancy term for ‘growing’) their businesses. And in this scaling process said businesses aim to replicate their exact models in different cities or locations. Some examples would be expanding restaurant chains, online businesses focused on the hyper-local (original idea for Epic Day), and… Continue reading Copy of a Copy
In my former life in the furniture industry, I had a saying that I frequently used when training sales people: “This business is simple, not easy.” I would often get confused looks in return so I began to explain in more detail as soon as I would spout it off, attempting to motivate new sales people in my class prior… Continue reading Simple, not easy
As my business partner and I were talking through our plans for how to build the community of our adventure travel company, we discussed the flywheel effect. A flywheel takes significantly more energy to get started in the beginning, but once it’s moving the inertia of what you’ve been doing previously takes over and the device is nearly self-propelling. It needs… Continue reading Flywheel Effect