In grad school I studied the case of Home Depot under then CEO Robert (Bob) Nardelli. This made big waves at the time because Bob made big promises to supercharge growth. Long-story short, that didn’t happen. The company got bigger, but profit didn’t budge, why? Well Bob just grew Home Depot to be bigger NOT…
There are certain advantages and disadvantages to consider when planning to build a service or a product business. For example, It’s typically easier to start and grow a service business than a product business. However, it’s typically easier to scale a product business than a service business. In this article, I’m going to dive further…
Technology can evolve rather rapidly at times, but how you respond to these changes really matters. Some of the biggest and most successful companies in the world have failed because they fought technology instead of embracing it. When’s the last time you were in a BlockBuster or used a BlackBerry Phone? In a recent conversation about a MedTech…
People overthink solutions all the time. Here’s one that still drives me crazy… I live in Pennsylvania and in PA we need to get our cars inspected each year. We also have a separate process for managing vehicle registration with the state which also includes paying fees. The ‘drove me nuts’ part was that my…
This episode, I explain how to prepare your professional service firm to be ready for growth, and how to create scalable services which will bring an increase in profit as well as revenue. Sean Boyce has run his own consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years and has founded multiple other companies at…
I’m big on process. I’m big on it because it’s a great way to make improvements quickly. Introducing software is a real commitment in time and money. This can slow everything down. So if you’re interested in making a small change that can make a BIG impact then I want you to find the bottleneck in…
Building a SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform is enticing…if it’s successful. Unfortunately, most are not. The failure rate for product companies is rumored to be greater than 90%. That’s an incredibly high failure rate. However, I feel the more important point is to study why these failures occur so frequently. One BIG problem in this space is…
Nik Shah from Home.LLC joins me to discuss how he helps people buy their first home with minimal savings, what makes a business model sustainable, and how he builds momentum in his startups. Nik Shah is an investor, entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO of Home.LLC where he helps people buy their first house and build…
We’ve all been there. An idea pops into our head and we start counting our dollars immediately as we think about how successful our new “app” is going to be. Then we proceed to get feedback from all the wrong places or find out we’re too late because there’s already an ‘app for that’. Don’t…
Often when people are thinking about designing features for their new product they have a tendency to let their imagination run wild and get overly excited. What if the software reads your mind about what you want for lunch then makes the meal for you! At least at the time of writing this email that…