twanless

Love Is Blind: Is Your Business Idea Really That Good?

You’ve been slav­ing away on the work­bench at your prod­uct, your ser­vice, and your busi­ness plan. You’ve laboured late into the night, putting all your rela­tion­ships on hold, and try­ing to ignore the no-nothings who freely offer advice on how you should do it. That’s because you have a GREAT IDEA for a business. You have this fan­tas­tic, whizz-bang, prod­uct or ser­vice that’s...

twanless

Grow A Service Business Creatively

I have just received an advance copy of Michael Michalko’s new book Cre­ative Thinker­ing and, not sur­pris­ingly, it got me thinking. Not just in a cre­ative way, but about cre­ativ­ity and its place in busi­ness generally. Now, most pro­fes­sional ser­vice providers don’t think a lot about cre­ativ­ity, unless their busi­ness demands it (in adver­tis­ing, for exam­ple). They tend to...

twanless

Confessions Of An (Reformed) Idea Slut

This is a mes­sage — and future pro­gram — for cre­atives, dream­ers, and dis­si­dents every­where.  Its  mes­sage? It’s okay to have lots — and lots — of ideas. But they need to be developed. I like to  tell every­one I meet that I’ve Never Met An Idea I Didn’t Like. It’s my mantra, my self– iden­tity, my rai­son d’etre. It’s also often been my downfall.   Yes, at...

twanless

Mentor For Rent: The Older Independent’s Value Proposition

Older inde­pen­dent pro­fes­sion­als can’t com­pete against younger peo­ple on speed, idea gen­er­a­tion, and tech­nol­ogy under­stand­ing. But they can stand out if they apply their wis­dom and ana­lyt­i­cal skills and rein­vent them­selves as hired men­tors. Many years ago, while train­ing in project man­age­ment,  I under­took a role-playing exer­cise in cor­po­rate...

twanless

The Curse of Complexity: Afraid To Be Simple

If you’re orga­niz­ing a busi­ness and want to be suc­cess­ful, answer some of the big, sup­pos­edly sim­ple, ques­tions first. Then, and only then, do you put the more com­plex mechan­ics of busi­ness oper­a­tion in place. Recently I’ve been work­ing with sev­eral young pro­fes­sional ser­vice com­pa­nies that are try­ing to cre­ate spe­cific online spaces to mar­ket and...