Guest Blog Posts

If you’re like any of the entrepreneurs I know, you could work with a lot of different types of clients. I’m sure you could help all sorts of people – and maybe in a bunch of different ways. 

However, if you try to do this when you’re starting out, or if you only want to be a solo practitioner, you will exhaust yourself. And you probably won’t be very successful.

The title of this post just made any Douglas Adams fans smile. It’s a line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It seemed appropriate because today is my last day as editor-in-chief of Business Unplugged™.

There’s that old saying that when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me. At no time is it truer than during the holidays.

It has been a tremendous learning experience working with Carol and helping shape this blog for the past eight years. During this time, we’ve changed and grown, and tried several different types of content.

“I don’t get no respect” is Rodney Dangerfield’s famous tag line that always gets a laugh. What I’ve personally experienced is entrepreneurs sometimes don’t get no respect either.

I have several colleagues who teach how to use LinkedIn to grow your business. In fact, I coach job search and solo consultant clients on how to use LinkedIn effectively.

I got some fun comments and reactions to “A Control Freak’s Guide to Change (Part 1)” so let’s continue our exploration of how you might be blocking change.

Actually, disruptive is virtually guaranteed. Because if things aren’t the same anymore (i.e., have changed), they’ve been disrupted.

Professionals in service-based businesses or vision-driven nonprofits can get really squishy about money. It can feel uncomfortable or out of alignment with your purpose or your organization’s mission to be profit motivated or focused on making money.

I immediately shared it on Facebook, but looking at the thumbnail below, you may be thinking: What kid? This looks really boring. I’m not clicking on that.

I had breakfast with a friend who is an incredibly talented musician recently. He’s working on his new CD and I asked him if he’d finished writing all the songs yet. He said that he was still working on it.

I wanted to riff on something that came up in a recent interview with Carol on women entrepreneurs. She mentioned that so many women have a wishy-washy answer filled with disclaimers about what they do, or what their business does. She said it makes her crazy.

In business and in life, it’s better to take the high road and do the right thing. It’s quite true that the people you meet on the way up may be the same people you meet on the way down.

You might be drawn to them for the type of business they have grown, their speaking style, their social media content, etc. You may follow different people for different things.

Twenty years ago, I was a new consultant at KPMG. I was sitting at a long conference table with nine other consultants who outranked me. Something I said really irritated the big-boss partner at the head of the table who started screaming at me in front of everyone that he could fire me right now if he wanted to.

In Part 1 here, we talked about how to identify what could be a good project, why you might want to do a project for a company first (to try before you buy), and how to prepare to get the work.

I am thrilled that The Art of Alchemy, founded by my friend Catherine Holtz, received a great media mention by Debbi Kickham on Forbes.com about their Dream Mask™ sleep mask.

Today I am going to a celebration of life service for a friend and fellow entrepreneur, Jean Pickering. I met Jean around the same time I met Carol in 2010 when we all attended a truly excellent event together.

I talked to several business owners this week who are seriously considering exiting their businesses and looking for corporate jobs.

It’s September 11 and here in the United States it will probably always be an emotional day. People remember where they were when the planes hit.

Professionals get certifications and use specific assessments with their clients, and both seem to find the process valuable. Many coaches and their clients love assessments.

I spit my coffee on my screen when I read the email below from a client of mine. He’s new to the brain-renter (consulting) space and he had a question that all of us wrestle with frequently:

Many of my clients are solo consultants, or will try to get consulting projects to bring money in during their job search. One of the most valuable things I do is help clients navigate the chaos of projects / contracts / full-time employment. 

This is something I have been noodling on for a while. I am good at a lot of things, and great at just a few things. Maybe this is the case for many entrepreneurs.

If your profitability isn’t what you want it to be, you’ve probably looked at your marketing, sales process, and business model. However, the real block might actually be your ability to receive.