twanless

Layer If You Want The Whole Cake

Lay­er­ing is a mar­ket­ing tech­nique that moves new clients through an extended sales process and allows them to pick what they need from you. A ver­sion of this post was pre­vi­ously pub­lished in the Finan­cial Post Entre­pre­neurs who make the tran­si­tion from cor­po­rate worker to inde­pen­dent busi­ness oper­a­tor invari­ably face one major hur­dle that hob­bles their...

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

All An Encore Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Sales Leads

Pre­vi­ously posted at http://www.sagespark.com/community As we have said often, oper­at­ing an encore busi­ness is dif­fer­ent than run­ning a more tra­di­tional one. Your busi­ness goals are usu­ally dif­fer­ent: You’re con­cerned as much with explo­ration and learn­ing as you are with mak­ing vast amounts of moolah. But you still have to make a lit­tle bit and that means you have to...

twanless

Top 5 Ways To Market the Encore Service Business

If you’ve started an encore busi­ness, it’s likely that it is some­how involved in pro­fes­sional services. Most midlif­ers and baby boomers pos­sess some skill they have learned while work­ing for larger busi­nesses. It’s in the sec­ond half of their life that they tire of the cor­po­rate set­ting and decide to open their own ser­vice busi­nesses. In corol­lary, many younger peo­ple,...

wanless

Killing Your Babies

A review of my wife’s new novel Under­ground (June Hut­ton, Cor­morant Books) called it “taut”, “lean” and “elegant”. It was, but hav­ing been involved in its cre­ation, I can assure you it wasn’t always so. Like many ideas, it was orig­i­nally con­fused, a lit­tle bloated, and unfo­cused. It took many rewrites and a lot of “killing her babies” before it became taut...