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Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself

Mike Michalowicz is one of my favorite business authors because he provides practical ideas that are easy to understand and implement to help a small business succeed. “Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself”   offers workable strategies to anyone looking to create a self-sustaining business model. The book is broken down into three phases: 1) Align, 2) Integrate and 3) Accelerate.  Each phase shares numerous concepts and examples for each of these phases. The overall focus of the book is to exp lain that a business owner does not need to be held hostage by his or her business but needs

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How CEOs Manage Time

How CEOs Manage Time It’s the scarcest resource you have. How you allocate it matters—a lot.  Time management is just as important for a small business owner as it is for a corporate CEO.  Both positions require a significant amount of time and energy.  However, there is a problem, there is never enough time. As the CEO you must manage your time to navigate the complex and demanding  challenges confronting your business by having a blend of strategic thinking, decision-making, and implementation steps to move your business forward.  You should already have some type of time management system in place. 

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From the CEO Bookshelf: The Structure of Success

If you are a small business owner you want to do everything possible to achieve success and avoid failure.  As the CEO of your business, you are the chief decision maker and you must make a lot of decisions. The fate of your business is directly influenced by the internal and external structures that you use to make decisions.  In The Structure of Success written by Patrick Esposito, he lays out a framework for making decisions but more importantly he provided relatable examples that you can use in your business. From the onset, Esposito introduces his readers to a thoughtfully

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How the Consumer Confidence Index can help your business

As the CEO of your business, you worry about daily operations, but you also need to be forward-looking and keep an eye on future economic conditions. Since most of us are not economists and do not have a crystal ball we have to make a best guess about where the economy is heading. A good way to gain a better understanding about future economic conditions is to figure out how consumers, (your customers) are thinking about the economic conditions.  You can get a good indication of consumer attitudes by checking out the Consumer Confidence Index. The Consumer Confidence Index (CCI)

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Super Bowl Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

This year’s Super Bowl was a mega-event watched by over 120 million people.  That’s a lot of eyeballs!!  There was some great football with a come from behind win by the Chiefs, a much-anticipated half-time show with Usher and Taylor Swift got  more than a few moments of TV time.  But how about the commercials? It took some big bucks to have a Super Bowl ad.  Many of them were very funny and memorable with some high visibility folks making the pitch, I guess Tom Brady and Beyonce needed something to do. If you step back and look at all

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