Charlie Gilkey

The Bias Against Service-Based Businesses

I find it both interesting and frustrating that some popular discussions of working for yourself excludes working with others. This particular notion sets a bias against a service-based business model because some of the implicit and explicit influencers in business so strongly delineate between working for yourself and working for other people. The goal of [...]

Read the full article →

Blog Your Own Adventure

Hugh MacLeod’s new book, Freedom is Blogging in Your Underwear, is a gem that shows how blogging has utterly changed the world for those of us that have embraced it. From the book: Having a blog, a voice, having my own media, utterly changed my life. [...] This gave me the freedom I spent most [...]

Read the full article →

You Don’t Have To Be Public About Everything

One of the things Tim Sanders  – one of my favorite speakers and mentors-from-afar – spoke about at SOBCon was the need for employers to give privacy back to their employees. There’s now too much social pressure to share your hard private journey with the social world due to social media. Given that both Angela [...]

Read the full article →

The Free Planners for May 2012 Are Available

May’s free planners are ready to go! I think this may be the latest day of the month we’ve ever shared the planners; May took off before we were ready for it, too. May can be a challenging month for a lot of people. At the same time that the seasons are changing and many [...]

Read the full article →

We’re Meant For More Than Selling And Making Money

A recent email conversation with an old comrade has me a bit unsettled. He and I shared our journey as entrepreneurs for a good bit but we ultimately took different routes. My passions and gifts laid with operations and strategy, and his were with marketing. In this conversation, he mentioned how he’s glad to be [...]

Read the full article →

More Than Being Smart or Lucky

The other day, someone said he wasn’t “smart or lucky enough” to do what I’m doing. It’s not the first time that particular person has said something along those lines, either, but that’s a completely different story. I’ve also had other people remark that I must have had an easy life since I’m generally calm [...]

Read the full article →

What WWII Can Teach You About Business: The Beachhead Offer

Many a novice entrepreneur or changemaker finds it hard to get going in the early stages of their venture because they’re trying too many things all at once. This is natural because Stage 1 is a huge learning lab where you’re saying YES to a lot of different things you might do, so you generate a [...]

Read the full article →

The Difference Between Starting And Running A Business

The activities you need to do to start your business are different than the activities you need to do to run your business after it’s already in flight. Too many business owners understand this far too late and often put the cart before the horse. For instance, let’s recall the four key dimensions of business: [...]

Read the full article →

The Business Lifecycle: The Cruise Stage

Editor’s note: This is Part 5 of the Business Lifecycle series. If you’d like to start from the beginning, check out the Aspirational stage of the Business Lifecycle. You’ve arrived at the lauded Stage 4: the Cruise stage in business. The cruise stage is another “no” stage. I like to liken the cruise stage to [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries