Sometimes, the cause of falling revenue is obvious – a major client fails, a sales channel quits, input costs increase, a new competitor enters your market. But more often, the cause is really hard to pin down and it can be really frustrating. Far too often we leap to price (our competitor is undercutting us), or sales effort (let’s have a sales...
Read MoreBusinesses survive and thrive for all sorts of reasons. Many of which are outside of our control. But many of them aren’t. There are strikingly few barriers to starting a business and consequently all sorts of dumb ideas, poorly executed, are attempted. As a result, only 10% of startups actually get into the
Read MoreWith some trepidation you strip down to the basics and attach the required ankle tracker. You have made a foolhardy(?) decision to go ahead with the venture. Physically you are committed. Mentally – not so sure. You shuffle forward to the end of the dock. The man says, “The timer starts when you step on the
Read MoreFor those who celebrate it – Happy Canada Day! Even if you are not fortunate enough to be a Canadian citizen, do feel free to celebrate the very fact of Canada. In many ways the world could use a bit more Canada just now. Here in Canada, we have muddled along quite well for the last 157 years managing to avoid too much controversy and minding...
Read MoreEarly in my career, I was handed a juicy but daunting task: break our company into the OEM market. We were a Montreal based truck spring manufacturer. While we had highly automated equipment, we kept the ability to make springs by hand, one at a time. When I joined, we were comfortably selling parts to small, independent truck repair shops. But...
Read MoreMany years ago, I was employee #14 at Bell Mobility in Canada, serving as Vice President responsible for securing dominant market share in Quebec and Eastern Ontario. At the time, we sold cellular subscriptions through phone retailers, whose sales reps could earn up to $1,000 per phone. While our competitors doubled down on this retail gold...
Read MoreIn a recent Tuesday TUNE-UP, I talked about PESTLE analysis. The timing was uncanny. Because Canada just got a new Prime Minister: Mark Carney. And on day one, he laid out one of the most business-relevant political agendas we’ve seen in years. Here are 10 key drivers you need to
Read MoreEvery Strategist knows the acronym PESTLE. It helps us to consider the context in which any planned course of action would take place. I encourage all leaders to put PESTLE into their strategic planning sessions. For those who don’t recall, PESTLE reminds us of the key areas to
Read MoreAbout 2500 years ago, 100km west of Shanghai, a young military scholar developed some unconventional ideas about strategy. He took the surprising step of documenting them in a book he called “The Art of War”. Importantly for our SMB clients, his approach was very much that of the
Read MoreBuyers are increasingly using AI to solve problems such as ‘How do I manage a sales funnel? How do I seal glass to aluminum? Where should I stay in Atlanta? They do this because they will get answers rather than a list of ‘sponsored’ web pages they could visit. And they typically get a prompt asking if they would like to know where they can buy...
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