They–the nameless and faceless people who make predictions about everything from the weather to the stock market–say it costs 6 times more to acquire a customer than it does to retain an existing customer. Interestingly, the literature contains references to acquisition to retention cost ratios ranging from 3:1 to 30:1. Quite frankly, I don’t know if the 6:1 metric is an urban myth or a thoroughly researched observation but I do believe Read more…
Yesterday I had a conversation with one of our clients who asked: “how can I get better clients?” He believed the problem he had was a marketing challenge. Read more…
Not so long ago I received an email from a guy who used to work for me in which he said “my resume looks good but I haven’t really found my sweet spot in the past couple of years …. you realize at 40 that the likelihood of changing industries or starting a game elsewhere is pretty unlikely so I’ll stick with the accounting industry for the next couple of years for bread-and-butter income and see where to go from there.”
I wrote a fairly lengthy response to his email that I believe would be of interest to anyone who Read more…
I recently finished reading Geoffrey Blainey’s A Very Short History of the World – all 450 pages of it! As interesting as it was, I’m so glad it was the short version. I came away from that book with a renewed appreciation of human accomplishment but that’s not want I want to talk about. Of the many things that resonated, one was Read more…
Studies of business survival over many years reveal a disturbing fact: five out of ten businesses do not survive more than five years and as few as 3 out of those that do survive the first five years live to Read more…
There are 3 basic types of people involved with business ownership. They are Investors, owner-managers who primarily work “IN” their business so we’ll call then IN-guys, and owner-managers who primarily work “ON” their business so we’ll call them ON-guys. If you want to grow the business advisory side of your firm you need Read more…
It was a dark and stormy night. The power was out and I heard the back door squeak. I was sure someone was in my kitchen. I called out but I couldn’t have expected what was about to happen … Read more…
The Gallup organization has been monitoring the level of employee engagement across national boundaries and industries for years. The numbers are not pretty. Gallup measures the degree of engagement based on employees’ ratings of key workplace elements such as having an opportunity to Read more…
Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey founded Barefoot Wine in 1986 almost by accident. They knew little about wine and had no idea what they were letting themselves in for at the time. They sold the business to E & J Gallo in 2005 and what they created has become the world’s largest selling wine brand. The story of how this amazing business Read more…
At our Bootcamps and other events one of the biggest and most important recommendations we made for getting team engagement was to stop doing annual performance reviews with your team members. I was reminded of this the other day when I saw a FB post from a good friend Michelle Golden in which she announced with deserved pride that the firm she is a Principal at, K-coe Isom, have abandoned doing annual reviews. Read more…
