At almost every event where I present for the IT service provider industry, I hear someone asking the question, "How should I be pricing, and how do I keep from changing my offerings up too frequently?" And I always say, "You price on value and you change as often as needed!" The responses I receive...

From a post on Facebook comes this case study in customer service on the company Meineke and more specifically the local shop run by one Tyler @ 2436 Gulf to Bay Blvd, Clearwater, FL 33765.

I'm going to follow the story in my blogging and see where it leads.

You've heard stories like this. Here's ...

One of my favorite things to say is, "You have to know the next five people you're going to hire or steal." By this, I simply mean that you must know who your next hire is. Ideally, the next front line money-making tech or engineer, but this can apply to the sales team, admin, or any other departmen...

What are the values you and your team actually live by in your business? To ask it another way, are the values you and your team live by the ones you've called out in your vision statement? It matters because these are two very different things. We have "these" values called out but "these" are the ...

I’m so tired of hearing PSA implementers, coaches, and IT service providers saying, “We have to focus on the SLAs so that we never break one!” That’s actually really a bunch of very backwards B.S.

Where do the PSA implementers get it from? They get it from the PSA vendors. Where do the coaches get ...

The business world is filled with competitive people. That’s human nature – it is the way it is. If people don’t compete to sit on the “business throne,” there won’t really be an incentive to make great things, will there?

That’s why our world advances faster every day – competition. When you have ...

Strategy is essential to the sustainability of a business. Formulating it might not be as exciting as leading people or marketing your products and services, but at its core, your business strategy is the beating heart of the entire organization.

The 2013 US Census reported that over 6 million smal...

I want to share a success story from one of my favorite and oldest clients and, more specifically, the owners of the company. These folks also happen to be what I consider close friends of mine. But I'm not sharing their story for the purpose of marketing and selling me or my services. I want to sha...

I really just want to share a cool aha moment of inspiration.

This past week I had been literally spending every waking hour of the days working on a design for our new training program. Now I'm not a graphics artist but I'm also not without skills. However, I found myself stuck on a design that st...

A subject I've intended to cover for some time is the eternal question of "How many endpoints should my team be able to handle?" This and "How many tickets per tech should we go through in a day or a week?" To me, these are both process control questions that go to the heart of a system's capability...

The simplest and most telling behavior of an organization that is without a true solid business strategy is that they spend the vast majority of their time focusing on the tactics of the business, and when asked if they have a strategy, they simply list the tactics they are focusing on. Tactics are ...

I was having a discussion with a small business owner a few weeks back about how their business was progressing. The sentiment was this: We're making it through the day. I thought about it for a minute and then I began asking some probing questions, as I'm prone to do: What are the roadblocks and bi...