Management
Michael Mehlberg
Project Management Solution? Keep It Simple ...

Project management is among a top skill to master in any business; especially one wanting to grow.

Why?

Because without project management, business owners will unnecessarily run into common issues:

Project Management Solution? Keep It Simple Stupid
Productivity
Michael Mehlberg
Getting Derailed? Leave Room to Accommodate the ...

You often get derailed by "the unexpected.”

It’s inevitable.

You get interrupted an unexpected number of times daily. Those interruptions come at unexpected times. They each take an unexpected amount of time with which to deal.

That’s why it’s "the unexpected."

These interruptions kill your flow, destroy your focus, and force you to work on the urgent instead of the important.

So how do you deter, prevent, and deal with the problems these unexpected interruptions incur? 

Getting Derailed? Leave Room to Accommodate the Unexpected
Product Development
Michael Mehlberg
The Exact Value of Your Million Dollar Idea

I was shocked, hurt, and felt like my idea had been stolen. Though I had the idea first, Nintendo would be the star. Nintendo would make $millions. It took years before I was old enough to recognize the important lesson in this experience... 

The Exact Value of Your Million Dollar Idea
Business
Michael Mehlberg
Finding Your Value Despite the Competition

Are you second-guessing your next great idea? Are you downplaying the value you could provide to others? Are you upset that you found a competitor in the market who seems to be offering everything you want to (and seems to be finding great success doing it)?

It might be time to step back and realize a few important things.

Finding Your Value Despite the Competition
Productivity
Michael Mehlberg
On the Power and Freedom of Getting Yourself ...
On the Power and Freedom of Getting Yourself (and Your Business) Organized
, , , ,

Top 7 Small Business Topic Posts of the Year

, , , ,
Top 7 Small Business Topic Posts of the Year

I’m a big believer in looking back, reflecting on what has gone well, and building on that in the new year to get closer to my goals.

When I look at Modern da Vinci, the growth we’ve seen is incredible. It’s a sign that we’re on the right track, but more importantly, it’s a sign that the small business community is as vibrant as ever.

Here are some incredible statistics from 2016:

  • Average reading time is up 21.45% over last year.
  • Bounce rate is down 35.14%.
  • 521.74% more page views this year over 2015.
  • 850.70% increase in new visitors in 2016!

These statistics are obviously exciting for Seth and me here at Modern da Vinci. But more so, these statistics should make you proud. Proud to be a small business owner. Proud to be part of an ongoing conversation with owners like yourself, all learning and growing together.

We’re excited for what’s to come in 2017. We’re looking forward to growing more with you and finding new small business owners like yourself to learn from.

But before we end 2016, it’s worth reviewing the top posts in each of the five areas for a growing, thriving small business.

,

3 Meaningful, Memorable, Holiday Gift Ideas for Your Employees

,
3 Meaningful, Memorable, Holiday Gift Ideas for Your Employees

I know you laughed as hard as I did…

A corporate Christmas gift, from a corporate big-wig, sent to a corporate weeny. It was a ridiculously funny scene. It was art imitating life. It hit close to home.

It was the Christmas gift (or some version of it) we could all see ourselves receiving from a terrible boss, at a terrible company.

27 years ago, on December 1st, Clark W. Griswold reminded the world just how bad a corporate gift could be when he received a “1-year membership to the Jelly of the Month Club.”

It was more than thoughtless, it did nothing to thank Clark for his hard work or show him that his company cared.

Why should this matter to you?

4 Ways Cash-Strapped Small Business Owners Can Save Big

4 Ways Cash-Strapped Small Business Owners Can Save Big

For small business owners, finances are nearly always in limbo. If you are running into stressful money moments, there are some steps you can take to make those moments less frequent and taxing on your business and your sanity.

What follows are four tips for small business owners who find themselves strapped for cash a little too often

What Every Business Owner Needs to Know About Financial Planning with Blake Fellows

What Every Business Owner Needs to Know About Financial Planning with Blake Fellows

Many small and medium-sized business owners kick the can down the road when it comes to financial planning. That’s understandable since business owners are preoccupied with short-term responsibilities and dealing with fires that inevitably pop up daily.

Unfortunately, this leaves the business owner and his or her partners and family members exposed to tremendous risk.

What happens if conditions change and the business fails? How will the business respond if a partner falls ill? What is the business exposed to as the market fluctuates? How can the business be financially responsible while offering competitive compensation and benefits to employees?

In this interview, business finance expert Blake Fellows explains why it is essential for business owners to be proactive about setting goals, determining ranges for spending and saving, ensuring that foundational agreements are in place, and having specialized support in all aspects of financial planning

,

How to Delight Customers on this Small Business Saturday

,
How to Delight Customers on this Small Business Saturday

It's Small Business Saturday, and today's the day when small businesses like yours get to fight for your share of the pie.

And the pie is quite large.

In 2015, over 95 million people spent $16.2 billion (with a B) in small businesses and more than 55% of Americans were aware of the holiday! This year, some project small businesses can look to claim nearly $18 billion in receipts, a 10% increase over last year [Grasshopper Blog – Small Business Saturday Statistics].

Whether you've prepared for this day or not, it's too late to adjust course now. It's too late to develop a new marketing campaign, and too late to create flyers for some new sale. 

But it's not too late (even if you are reading this at the end of the day) to do a few simple things that will delight your customers, getting them spending more money, getting them to share the word with friends and family, and ultimately attracting more customers to your business.

2 Valuable Leadership Lessons from an Ugly Presidential Election

2 Valuable Leadership Lessons from an Ugly Presidential Election

Like many of you, I thoroughly appreciated the thoughtfulness, rationality, and unifying nature of the recent presidential election.

As I was reflecting on how much everyone seemed to enjoy the entire election process and subsequent goodwill it created, a remarkable idea came to me. I thought, “why don’t I write a post that brings the election back up since people clearly haven’t had enough of it?”

Sarcasm aside, I do believe there is something useful we can learn from the election, although I’m not going to focus on anything in the political arena. Instead, I’d like to talk about leadership issues that seemed to plague the candidates throughout the process. I’m specifically referring to two key leadership attributes where both candidates demonstrated obvious and consistent weaknesses...

How to Know the Right Skills (and Perfect Time) to Hire

How to Know the Right Skills (and Perfect Time) to Hire

The thought of burning cash on a new employee who can't keep up with the work and is making life worse for everyone around them is a real threat.

On the flip side are small business owners who need to hire but won't pull the trigger. They stand frozen by uncertainty. They don't know who to hire, and can't justify hiring to grow their business. So they don't act. Their businesses are suffering from overwork and stagnant growth. 

What these unfortunate small business owners don’t have is a method to sort through the confusion, making it clear when to bring on a new employee, and what skills they should have. 

This is the method I’m going to show you today. And if you’re not sure it’s needed, consider this:

The Critical Importance of Lead Validation in Internet Marketing

The Critical Importance of Lead Validation in Internet Marketing

If you’re investing in a lead generation campaign, it’s safe to say you want a bang for every buck you spend. The last thing you’d want to do is to invest in campaigns with little or no return in sight, but the reality is many companies have unwittingly fallen into that trap.

Over the last 18 months, we have collected and analyzed more than 373,000 inquiries. This “Importance of Lead Validation” study indicates that as many as 50 percent of website conversions are not sales leads.

So, what are they? 

Why Your Elevator Pitch Gets Ignored and How to Fix It

Why Your Elevator Pitch Gets Ignored and How to Fix It

Have you ever been caught flat-footed when someone asks, “so what do you do?”

Me too.

Ever answered that question by saying, “I work for such and such company and we do blah”?

Yeah, me too. And it NEVER converts to a sale.

For some reason, when it's time to deliver your elevator pitch, it’s easy to get all flustered. You ramble on about your back-story or throw your company name at them followed by some industry jargon.

And what do you get in return?

Blank stares, an “oh, that sounds interesting,” or your audience reminisces about a similar idea they had once upon a time.

It sucks, and you know it sucks because it feels terrible. And it feels terrible because you sense a lost opportunity.

Well, in the next 10 minutes, we're going to outline a process for creating an elevator pitch that works for you. One that opens doors and creates conversation. One that has real potential to lead to a sale.

How to Win More Negotiations by Changing Your Conflict Style

How to Win More Negotiations by Changing Your Conflict Style

When a conflict arises, most people have a default approach for how they handle the situation. Many of us are not conscious of our conflict style; we respond automatically without giving thought to the circumstances.

This is significant in the context of negotiations. A negotiation is a type of conflict – a situation where your concerns and interests are not aligning with those of another person, and you are actively seeking a solution.

Understanding your tendencies in responding to conflict, and how you may need to adjust them, will give you an advantage as you work through a negotiation. If you can assess each conflict and negotiation situationally, you can intentionally utilize the style that will be most beneficial to you.

How to Win a Negotiation Without Destroying Relationships

How to Win a Negotiation Without Destroying Relationships

So far in this series, we have explored several common mistakes that can harm negotiations as well as tactics you can employ to avoid negotiation pitfalls. This post is about re-framing the way we view negotiations, especially regarding how we look at the “other side” that we are negotiating with. The idea is to achieve a satisfactory result without damaging relationships.

How to Negotiate Better by Creating New Possibilities

How to Negotiate Better by Creating New Possibilities

Negotiations can be tough.

They are often high pressure, high stakes situations with tight deadlines and demanding stakeholders. Opinions and interests can differ widely among parties, and strong emotions may come into play. When we are under this type of pressure, we often find ourselves stumped. Our thinking narrows and our creative muscles feel constrained.

The Principled Negotiation Method defined in Getting to Yes suggests several strategies to counteract this. The premise is that “The key to wise decision making lies in selecting from a great number and variety of options.”

How to Prevent Negotiation Disasters with a Plan B

How to Prevent Negotiation Disasters with a Plan B

Preparation is essential to effective negotiation. If you wish to reach a fair and satisfactory deal, you need to enter the negotiation with a clear understanding of your interests, options, comparative data, and objective criteria.

One of the most important data points to consider is your “Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement”. This serves as your “Plan B” to the negotiation. In other words, it is the best option you have and the one you will live with should you leave the negotiation without an agreement.

If you don’t know your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, you may end up taking a deal that is worse than your backup option, or you may walk away from a deal that is better than your backup option.

In this podcast, we will give you some simple steps to create your best alternative to a negotiated agreement and use an example to drive the point home. 

How to Dramatically Improve Your Negotiating with This Simple Technique

How to Dramatically Improve Your Negotiating with This Simple Technique

Negotiation is a back-and-forth communication that is designed to reach an agreement among parties that have both shared and differing interests.

We all deal with negotiating each day, whether on simple matters like what to eat for dinner to complex decisions involving high stakes business matters with multiple parties.

The purpose of negotiations is to produce wise agreements as efficiently as possible while maintaining or strengthening relationships.

In this brief podcast, we specifically look at what “Interests” are, and what it means to focus on interests (not positions) to get better results from your negotiations. 

Business Focus and Clarity: How to Crush it with a Mentor

Business Focus and Clarity: How to Crush it with a Mentor

The most successful business leaders of this world, the ones who achieve incredible success, did so with the help of others. Before they earned their success, they learned from the masters of their time. They were mentored until they had turned the best lessons from someone more skilled than themselves into their own.

Plenty of posts out there tell you how to find a mentor, what questions to ask a mentor, etc. But none of them really share how mentors can provide us with a decisive advantage. None of them help small business owners realize that some of the problems they face (like focus, uncertainty), can be addressed by a mentor in minutes. None of them tell a story of how a mentor made a difference or changed the author’s thinking.

In this post, I want to share with you one such story of how a mentor changed my thinking (it sucked in the moment), and why having a mentor is so critical to your success as a small business owner.  

The 7 Best Lead Generation Tips on the Internet

The 7 Best Lead Generation Tips on the Internet

One of the biggest struggles small business owners have is generating leads. 

Sound like you? 

Even if you're not "struggling," you'd probably like to have a few more. I know I would. 

That's why I went on a voyage across the Internet, searching for a cheat sheet, an ultimate guide, or any enlightening article on lead generation ideas. But after reading more than 50 articles, listening to dozens of podcasts, and skimming the highest rated sales books on Amazon, here's what I found:

Nothing.

Sure, some articles had a few good tips, but most were incomplete or misguided. No single article had it all. No single article was full of quality ideas for generating leads. So, I set about creating this article—a collection of the best tips on the Internet for generating quality leads—first for myself, and now for you.

How To Influence Your Customers to Buy Using Neuroscience with Glen Hellman

How To Influence Your Customers to Buy Using Neuroscience with Glen Hellman

Glen Hellman is a business expert and strategist that writes and presents on the topic of “How To Pitch to the Reptilian Brain.”  It’s an approach grounded in neuroscience that is designed to influence others and move them to action.  In this interview, Glen shares his insights on how to use these principles to sharpen your business’s sales pitch and how they can improve your leadership and business in general. 

How to Deliver Bad News and Have Your Customers Thank You for It

How to Deliver Bad News and Have Your Customers Thank You for It

Look, there’s no way around it. Delivering bad news sucks.

When you’re receiving bad news, you sit back, you listen, and you react.

But when you are delivering bad news, your mind races with possibilities: What will I say? How will I say it? How will they react? What if they get angry? What if… what if…

It doesn't get any easier as a small business owner. With your customer's satisfaction and the revenue they generate at risk, delivering bad news can be downright stressful.

If you've never had to deliver bad news to a customer, congratulations. This post is for you. Because inevitably, you will.

If you have had to deliver bad news to a customer, I feel for you. This post is for you as well. Because I've been there a few times before. So many times, actually, my business finally figured out how to do it well. In fact, after delivering the worst news in our company's history, the customer literally called us back to thank us for it.

I’d like to tell you that story, and help you craft a “bad news message” for the next time you need to do the same.

3 Hidden Sticking Points that Plague Small Businesses

3 Hidden Sticking Points that Plague Small Businesses

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from building several small businesses and working with small business owners, it’s that running a small business is hard and growing one is even harder.

There are many reasons why, but at the simplest level, it’s because you’ve got too many problems and too much to do with limited help and resources. Yet, through dedication, skill, and innovation, motivated business owners find a way to get things going. 

Yet, almost inevitably, most small businesses eventually hit a “sticking point.” Sales may flat-line or even decline. Issues with customers and quality emerge. Conditions in the market change. Cash runs short. Colleagues and employees become frustrated.

It’s is a critical time in your business. Not time to panic, but time to take quick and decisive action to right the ship.

The key at this point is taking the right action.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at three underlying and sometimes hidden factors that can cause your business to hit a sticking point. They exist on a foundational level and can impact the business from the inside out.