This column is all about creating and honoring “the big enough company”, that is – one that is grown purposefully and in accordance with particular goals, rather than one that pursues growth for growth’s sake.

In our super-sized culture we’re programmed to look at status symbols, accumulation, and consumption as markers of success. But the truth is that success is not about size, it’s about satisfaction. Instead of automatically continuing to grow, entrepreneurs today are getting wiser about identifying their unique goals and needs and then build a business that’s big enough to support them.

Exploring the rewards of entrepreneurship

Defining your READ MORE »

Bookkeeping is a task that is hated, or at least avoided, by most entrepreneurs. Many experts say this aversion comes from a lack of basic understanding and comfort with the principles and value. I thought it’d be helpful to start this tax year with the right attitude. So we are scaling it way back and starting at the very beginning with these helpful resources.

Who doesn’t love a fresh start? For many entrepreneurs the New Year ushers in renewed enthusiasm and determination to get organized and do things “right.” With visions of perfectly organized documents and plans, we set up new protocols for every aspect of our business, sign up for new courses and initiatives and, after much scrutiny, purchase a new calendar, which we hope will make us all the more productive.

Predictably, we overindulge, biting off more than we can chew. More often than not, the complicated routines and infrastructure that we’ve created causes us to abandon our efforts and within weeks we READ MORE »

Whether or not to: opt into an early layoff package at a big Wall Street law firm in favor of starting my own business.

Why I was tempted to say no: The Fear Factor.   Despite the fact that I had been unhappy in my job for a long time, fear of failure, fear of running my own business, fear of stepping into the unknown had kept me locked into private practice on Wall Street for a very long time.  The comfort of a steady paycheck, and a high-paying one at that, had been the excuse I had relied upon for years to justify the misery of my day-to-day READ MORE »

Whether or not to:

Less than two years into our business, my co-founder and I were asked to partner with a much bigger company, a job postings board, to handle all of their career coaching services.

Why I was tempted to say yes:

There were so many attractive possibilities:

This company had 7-figure unique hits to its website.  At the time we had about 1,000.   It would be instant growth by a factor of 1,000!

This company is a very well-known brand.  Aligning with them would give us immense credibility.

This was a path to leveraging and scaling our high-touch business.  Professional services via 1:1 delivery is not scalable.  Sure, we could hire READ MORE »

Name: Caroline Green

Business: IvanExpert, onsite Mac support for home and small business in New York City

We offer IT support for small businesses and home users in NYC. Three years ago we made a conscious decision to do only Apple and Mac consulting, and to stop working with Windows users. (We do, however, support Mac users in a PC environment or with a PC server.)

Why did we decide to say no to providing support for PCs?

After looking at our list of clients and the work we had done READ MORE »

This biggest favor that you can do yourself is to focus your time and energy on getting through these three critical stages, and learning as you go.

1. Get Your Product Out There

It’s tempting to fuss and READ MORE »

I give the same answer to at least half of the business advice questions that I am asked.

“How should I get the word out about my new service?”

“What’s the best way to reach my target market?”

“What conferences are worth attending?”

“How much should I pay my staff?”

“How do I find a good manufacturer … sales rep … or cost-effective printer?”

“Ask your network,” I reply again and again and again. In my opinion it’s the easiest and fastest way to get the best answers to almost any question.

Veteran entrepreneurs usually nod in agreement, mentally scan their network, ask READ MORE »

We all do it and in many ways, we all dread it. We are at a party, a conference or some other gathering and it is totally unavoidable. That’s right, it’s the “what do you do?” question. Of course, it is one of the most natural conversation topics but also potentially one of the most fraught with unease. For small business owners, it is often a tremendous business development opportunity, that is if you deliver your pitch well. I am all for having a concise and clear business pitch but I think that telling stories about what you do can make a lasting impact. Here READ MORE »

I know what you might be saying to yourselves, “What? Are you crazy? Not grow my business? Isn’t that the point? How else will I be successful?” I hear your concern. Before you dismiss the choice not to grow, take a minute to think about your goals and impact of growth.

Much of the business world has a real addiction to size. We believe that bigger is better. Period. We impress each other by talking about numbers of employees, sales, market share and locations. From the second that most entrepreneurs start their business, they are encouraged to start thinking about just READ MORE »

Whether or not to: Eliminate a service or product offering in order to focus your mission

Why I was tempted to say yes: As a communication and language skills company, we offer everything from Language Classes to Presentation Skills Workshops to Executive Coaching .  For many years, we also provided Translation and Interpreting services to multi-national companies and government agencies.  Being newly certified as a woman-owned business five years ago, I wanted to add as many clients to our list as possible—growing a large base of staff to work with a highly prestigious government READ MORE »

A recent trip (and the packaging, flying, and transport involved) made me reflect on my affection for a particular hair care product. I really wanted to take it with me but I was out and really went out of my way to restock beforehand. I found myself thinking about how I became acquainted with it in the first place. It remembered that more than five years ago I found it in the checkout lane of Sephora amid other travel-sized products and bought it on a whim. That led me to think about my loyalty to various brands and how I was introduced to them or encouraged to give them READ MORE »

We’re big on peer relationships. We run a community that is built around in-person interaction and believe that a strong network of peers is every entrepreneur’s best tool. A robust network can give you all the answers, support, inspiration and troubleshooting you need to be successful. And luckily, entrepreneurs are notorious for being generous with their time, experience, and advice.

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, has been all over the pages of business publications this month as he promotes his new book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul. I’ve read a lot of the pieces with great interest because the Starbucks story READ MORE »

Zingerman’s community of businesses is a company that I have long looked to as a guide and interesting example of growth. I first read about Zingermans in Small Giants (my favorite book), in which Bo Burlingham highlights Zingerman’s unusual and innovative growth strategy.

Zingerman’s started as a deli committed to excellence. Their above-and-beyond customer experience and unending commitment to high-quality food made their store legendary, both in their own town of Ann Arbor and across the country. Despite great acclaim and clamouring national demand, Zingerman’s decided not to grow by replicating their existing business in multiple cities but instead by creating a community of businesses in the Ann Arbor READ MORE »

Jack Canfield (of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame) once said, “If you want the fast track to personal growth, get married, have children and start a business.  Everything in your life that doesn’t work will show up.”  In other words, taking on any new life role, including that of an entrepreneur, will raise all the personal issues you will then need to work on, causing you to evolve…whether you wanted to or not!   In particular, it is an often over-looked truth that to grow, master or transform our businesses, we must grow, master or transform ourselves.  Success, in any endeavor, starts from within.

Here are 3 ideas that will help READ MORE »

Whether or not to: Donate candy for a wedding that was being filmed for a “Wedding Inspired” Television show.

Why I was tempted to say yes:I was tempted to say yes because I thought that this could provide a national, public platform to expose my brand.  I was also tempted to get involved because the host of the show is a party planner to the stars and felt it could be great networking.

Why I ultimately said no:I ultimately said no because they were offering me a rolling credit at the end of the show.  Candidly, since very few people actually look at READ MORE »

Kathleen Parker, author of Save the Males: Why men matter and why women should care, wrote a great article entitled Born Again Feminism in the new Newsweek/DailyBeast.com magazine last week, which was dedicated to Women Who Shake the World. Parker discusses the costs women bear from trying to fit into a male dominated world and zeroes in on one cost in particular: forgetting to enjoy being women.

There was one paragraph that really stuck out to me:

“We were trying not just to be as good as men, but to be men. I have the neckties to prove it. It turns out that women make lousy men, READ MORE »

Whether or not to: Keep my professional organizing practice going after launching my Feng Shui business two years ago.

Why I was tempted to say yes:

First, a bit of history.  In 2003 I launched a professional organizing business called The Organized Life.  I started going into people’s homes and businesses, helping them clear clutter and make difficult decisions about their “stuff.”

I already had a little bit of background in Feng Shui which I’d been using for many years to improve my life at home and at work.  It wasn’t long before I recognized the parallels between what I was trying to help people do as an organizer, and READ MORE »

“My name is Erica Ecker, and I am a recovering perfectionist.” This is my confession, and let it be a clarion call to all.

For years, I agonized, spending countless hours “perfecting” my clothing closet, my kitchen cabinets, my desk, my files, my labeling systems and more.  I shifted items here, then there. I sought out the ideal bin or box. But did it make any real difference?  While busy making “perfect,” I wasted time better spent seeing friends, growing my professional organizing business, reading a delicious book, enjoying the city and the park.

The thing is, I was already very organized. I was born organized READ MORE »