It won’t surprise anybody to hear that the recent recession caused average wages in the United States, Canada, and around the world to take a beating. Workers everywhere have been suffering through a period of what economists optimistically call “wage adjustment,” with wages stationary or even decreasing almost across the board. With unemployment still elevated in the developed world, there’s plenty of opportunity – and incentive – for corporations to...
I’m sure most of us have been in the situation I’m about to describe. You’re low on money and it’s about time for all your bills to come due. You’ve got just enough to scrape by and get everything paid, but you’re leaving yourself just a little short for a while. You make an executive decision to let a bill or two slide into the next month so you’ve got...
History is full of people with partners, without whom they never would have enjoyed the success they had. Take comedy, for example - you have Abbott and Costello, Penn and Teller, George and Gracie, and, say, Bush and Cheney. Each person (ok, with the possible exception of Bush and Cheney) could have become a success on their own, but having that additional person there to work with, bounce ideas off...
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...
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...
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...
Starting, building, and managing a business may be your best chance to earn a real return on your investment, but it’s no cakewalk. The small business failure rate is substantial – in fact, on average only 29% of small business startups survive for more than ten years. That sounds risky, and indeed it is. However, not all businesses are created equal, nor do all types of businesses fail at the...
Some of you may have noticed that posts have been coming a little less frequently around here. Over the past few months I've moved from every weekday, to Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to just Monday and Friday, in order to better accommodate my schedule (and to avoid burning myself out on writing this blog, which is something I think we'd all like to avoid). New posts generally go up between the hours...
I talk a lot about the importance of having a good team working with you. And with good reason. While there are plenty of business ventures you can undertake completely by yourself, most will require you to work with others in one form or another, and having a team as a part of your business (or businesses) is a smart move for a huge number of reasons. But what do you...
Picture this: you’re at your job, working on a typical day’s work. Your boss comes over and says that something major has happened, and the company needs you to take on an extra task. What do you say? There isn’t much opportunity for you to say no – in a very real sense, your job is to simply do what your boss says. Neither is there much opportunity to negotiate...