Diversify

When people think about earning an income, typically they think about having a job. And why not? That’s what you’re trained for throughout your educational years and onward into adulthood, and it’s a system that has worked (for  better or for worse) since the Industrial Revolution. A job seemed to offer security – a paycheck, a pension, reliable work – by tapping in to the business owner’s resources and networks in exchange for providing one’s own labour and effort on the owner’s behalf.

I won’t belabour a point we’ve all had to learn the hard way the past few years,…

Freedom

We’ve all heard the news. Europe is sliding back into a recession as its economic elites continue to slash any spending that benefits the average citizen. In America, the Republicans have voted consistently to end Medicare and may gain enough power in the 2012 elections to achieve their aims. And Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party has floated the idea of slashing retirement benefits for future generations (though not, it should be noted, for Members of Parliament). Meanwhile, corporate profits hit record levels – as the wages they pay their employees stagnate and unemployment…

Managing Feedback

In many ways, your business is like an organic life form – it grows, it consumes resources and converts them into other resources, and if neglected it decays and eventually dies. It makes sense that business would in so many ways mimic their component human lives, just as the human life cycle so closely resembles (and is so utterly dependent on) the life cycles of its constituent cells.

Another sense in which business resembles organic life is the response to stimuli. When you step on a tack or grab a hot pan, your body instinctively reacts and recoils to prevent…

Communicate, Don’t Market

Nobody likes spam. It’s that simple. But there aren’t many people out there who like being left in the dark, either, and as an entrepreneur, you need to make effective use of every tool at your disposal to ensure that you get your message out to your target market. There’s no denying that email remains one of the most cost-effective and quickest methods of communicating with your client and customer base. So how do you know you’re not abusing it?

Every person is going to have a different baseline tolerance level for email receipt. Moreover, that tolerance is going…

Enjoy Yourself!

People talk about business when they’re getting serious. “Let’s get down to business.” “It’s business time.” “She’s all business.” And that’s no surprise – we live in a culture that takes business very seriously. It’s easy to think that the two words are synonyms.

That leads to another common conflation of words – people tend to think that “work” is the opposite of “fun.” Again, that’s understandable – certainly most people find going to work to be an obstacle to the things they really enjoy – but it’s also unfortunate, because it doesn’t have to be that way.

In fact, some…