As I'm sure we've all noticed by now, the quality of products and services available these days is dropping at an alarming rate. Extremely expensive consumer electronics appear engineered to break, call centers where clients expect competent and timeless conflict resolution are instead outsourced to countries where the Customer Service Representatives barely speak English and read almost everything from a script. And when was the last time you heard about...
Last week we talked about the art of negotiation from the point of view of the person with a product or service to offer. But there are two sides to every coin, and this week we'll be looking at the other one. That of the person trying to do the haggling, trying to score themselves a deal, and as such, hopefully earn themselves a slightly larger piece of PIE. The...
So you've decided to step out of the 9-5 world and take your first step on your path to PIE. You're motivated. You're focused. You feel ready for anything. You're Muhammad Ali, and the world is Sonny Liston. You have a plan. You have a goal. You have absolutely no idea what you're going to sell. You have a problem. Fortunately, it's not really that hard of a problem to...
Many of you will probably remember making presentations from school, or worse, your time as a 9-5er. They're awkward, uncomfortable, nerve-wracking experiences. They're also essential to success. There will come a time, regardless of your business, where you will be faced with the task of presenting yourself and your business to prospective clients. There isn't really any getting around it. Fortunately, there are ways to make it a little easier...
As I've become so fond of saying on this blog, there's an old saying. "When it rains, it pours." Anyone who's ever, well, lived, knows this is true. When things go wrong, things tend to go really wrong. Often multiple things at once. In the most extreme of cases, this can lead to the flat out failure of your business. But that doesn't always have to be the case, and...
Forget every racial stereotype you've ever heard. Everyone on the planet loves to haggle. Everyone loves to try and get a deal. Some may be more aggressive than others (and again, this has nothing to do with race), but in general, everyone will try to get something from you for cheaper than what it's offered. Make no mistake my friends, this is going to happen to you. It is unavoidable,...
I want you all to think about a hypothetical situation. For some reason, the government has decided they want to audit your business. They want to see sales reports, payroll, the whole nine yards. There's just one problem. All these necessary reports are scattered about your home office, strewn haphazardly across multiple areas on multiple computers, or both. You know you have all the reports requested (or you think you...
A very wise man once said, "With great power comes great responsibility." Most of you may recognize this quote from the Spider-Man film series as spoken by the character Ben Parker, but it was originally written in 1962 by Stanley Martin Lieber. You will probably know him better by his pen name Stan Lee, the creator of Spider-Man and most of Marvel Comics' other major characters, and the most recognizable...
Everybody loves having free time. I don't even need a link for a study on that as proof, it's undeniable fact. Every single person, from the unemployed, all the way through the 9-5ers and up to the self-employed like us, loves having time to pursue their own interests, relax, spend time with their family, or any number of other things. As I mentioned way back in this article at the beginning...
We're just about into August now, the last full month of summer vacation before the young ones head back to school. Feel free to take a moment and breathe a sigh of relief. All done? Okay, good. Now down to business. There are many people out there who do the stay at home parent thing, while their partner works. And that's fine, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you...