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

The One-Hour Reinvention Plan

Every rein­ven­tion, whether per­sonal or busi­ness, requires some explo­ration. But, that explo­ration can too eas­ily become wan­der­ing aim­lessly. You need a map to guide you along the path. Recently I was work­ing with an entre­pre­neur on a way to start a new busi­ness. Quickly, it became appar­ent that he was pretty fuzzy on what he wanted to do. You see, he’d closed his for­mer...

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...

twanless

Reinventing Your Career As An Independent 3: Think Like An Investor

When you oper­ate an inde­pen­dent or soloist  busi­ness, you need to act like a CEO who has just received funds from investors. This forces you to plan for a future of growth and balance. Too many inde­pen­dents, or soloists, strike out on their own with­out any con­cept of what they want to do or how they’re going to do it. Sure, they often have a skill they learned in the cor­po­rate...

twanless

Reinventing Your Career As An Independent 2: Managing The Business

In the last post, we men­tioned that one of the best things you can do when going inde­pen­dent is to learn how to run an entre­pre­neur­ial busi­ness. Now we’ll explore that through the lens of the tra­di­tional grid of man­age­ment functions. Strat­egy. Most peo­ple think this means writ­ing a busi­ness plan. It doesn’t. A busi­ness plan, while con­tain­ing some strate­gic aspects,...