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On your professional journey, there may come a point where your current role starts to feel limiting or constrictive. For me, that moment arrived quietly—after years of coaching individuals through transitions, clarity sessions, and vocational planning. I began to notice a shift: not in them, but in me. I wasn’t just focusing on individuals anymore. I was thinking bigger. I was offering frameworks. I was mapping processes and training new instructors. I was developing programs, curriculums, tool

Have you ever thought about becoming a consultant? What exactly is a consultant, really? The term can feel vague—almost like a catch-all for anyone running a solo business. The truth is, consulting can look very different depending on your industry, your focus areas, and the types of solutions you offer. How do you want to share your expertise? Are you clear on what your expertise even is? I’ve been pondering these questions myself, having recently stepped into the world of consulting. It’s both

Large businesses do a lot of strategic planning. They have the resources. And they have a lot of stakeholders who will be displeased if something fails. So they need to think things through to ensure success. Small businesses, on the other hand, only have their very survival on the line. They don’t have resources. And what resources they have are often working outside of their area of expertise. The number of things they have to react to now is so high, that thinking things through becomes a lux

Yes. Content marketing is vital. And worthless. This is because it’s the wrong question to ask. A better question is what do you need to prove to your customers so that they can trust you enough to buy from you? Don’t try to answer this question in terms of how can you persuade them or claims you can make. But do think in terms of what does the buyer need to realize to even consider what you have to offer. Don’t try to answer the question with a pleasant sounding platitude about how great you ar

Carl’s latest article, Is the way you identify your business limiting it?, struck a deep chord with me. The railroad analogy is powerful—not just in how it applies to business strategy, but in how it quietly mirrors something I see in nearly every entrepreneur I work with: We over-identify with what we do, instead of honoring who we are. We say: “I’m a coach.” “I’m a creative.” “I only work with [type of client].” “I don’t do sales.” “I’m not technical.” These might seem like harmless statements

Why aren’t railroad companies a thing anymore? The classic business school example of this features the railroad industry. We don’t think much about railroads. There’s a reason for that. Railroads used to be the best way to get cargo anywhere on land. Freight trains can be a mile or two long and carry much more, far more cheaply, than trucks. Airplanes were new and expensive. Railroads weren’t interested in trucks, air transport, or boats. They were railroads. What if something originated overse

I run the business. I manage the finances. I take out the trash. Just like a lot of entrepreneurs. In the beginning I couldn’t afford to outsource anything. The biggest challenge is doing enough marketing, product development, and fulfillment to not only get by, but to also grow. Here’s how I did it. I created a marketing assembly line. Every week I created new content. My target was a 500 word article. It took me less than two hours to write each one. I featured the article in my newsletter. An

From time to time kids think about starting a business, especially before they can be legally hired or when they are having trouble finding a job that can work around their school schedule or transportation needs. The first thing that occurs to many of them is services, although they don't even understand that use of the word. They think in terms of what they can do like the classics: lawn mowing and snow shoveling. They quickly find out that it’s hard to get enough customers who pay enough to m

I run the business. I manage the finances. I take out the trash. Just like a lot of entrepreneurs. In the beginning I couldn’t afford to outsource at all. The biggest challenge was to do enough marketing, product development, and fulfillment to not only get by, but to also grow. My business relies on content marketing. Here’s how I built it. Finding the time to create massive amounts of content I created a marketing assembly line. Every week I created new content. And featured it in a newsletter

A lot of people get started in business by jumping in and selling. Then they look for better techniques. Whenever things get tough, they look for better techniques again. I love bootstrapping and have done more than my fair share of this. What I’ve learned is that most of the “techniques” out there are completely valid --- for someone else. The things you hear about the latest paradigm-shifting revolutionary techniques that sound so appealing, probably don’t apply to you. And if they do, they pr

Sometimes we get in our own way. Sometimes we assume. Sometimes we put ourselves in a box. And sometimes the many ways our thoughts can go wrong or be limited can hold back the success of our business. Mindset matters. I find the act of inquiry, or simply asking questions, to be profoundly important for, well, basically everything. But if you want to be mundane about it, inquiry is at the core of discovering what to write, how to build your processes, uncovering the truth about anything, knowing