Michael on Entrepreneurship

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What I hate about the 4-hour work week …

in On Entrepreneurship

Let’s start at the beginning. I don’t hate Timothy Ferriss, nor do I hate his book, “The Four Hour Work Week.” In fact, I think the book is excellent in many ways on a tactical level. What I do hate is the underlying philosophy that makes an idea like The 4- Hour Work Week so

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Is “find a need and fill it” bad marketing advice?

in On Entrepreneurship

Just because marketing advice is repeated often … doesn’t make it true. “Find a need and fill it … that is the key to successfully marketing a business.” – Someone who needs to be slapped around a little bit. Truth is, follow this “find a need and fill it” advice and you are inviting commodity

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Still cold calling for B2B lead generation?

On Marketing To Small Businesses

When I write about touchy subjects, I get angry E-mails. In July of 2004, I wrote that b2b marketers and salespeople that rely on cold calling are like functional drunks. They don’t grow fully because of it … in the back of their mind they know it is bad for them … yet they manage

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Experiences and story, the foundation of luxury marketing offers

On Entrepreneurship

Exceptional experiences that pack a story to tell are the new luxury marketing offers. (And there is a lesson here for all businesses, marketing to the affluent or not, so read on.) People with disposable, six-figure incomes are spending money on luxury goods that used to be reserved for the “upper crust” of society. These

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5 critical questions for effective Small Business Advertising

On Entrepreneurship

If you honestly evaluate your advertising using the five questions in this message, one of two things will happen: You’ll discover that your advertising provides compelling and powerful answers to each and every question. If so, congratulations—you’re in the top 1% of all small business advertisers, and you’re achieving amazing results from your advertising. or

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Workouts, pain, growth and Entrepreneurship

On Entrepreneurship

For over a year, I spent my Tuesdays and Fridays sweating/grunting/bleeding/puking at Maximum Bob Whelan’s gym in Chinatown, Washington D.C. Calling it a gym might be a stretch. It was more a cave-like dwelling devoted to the voluntary infliction of pain and testing of limits. I loved everything about it. A couple of months in,

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Fast Business Growth with Leveraged Marketing

On Entrepreneurship

Landon, a computer reseller in Toronto, Canada, wrote it to ask: “Michael, so much of what you talk about will cost money, but I’m stretched so thin right now that even a small expenditure is too much. If you had a turn around a small reseller quickly and without spending any money on marketing, how

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Why I love local internet marketing & local small businesses

On Local Business Marketing

A few days back, a friend asked me why I spend so much time working with small businesses on their local internet marketing. His argument was that there is much more money to be made working with larger companies that have more money to spend. Maybe, maybe not. But to really answer the question, I

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Raw truth about “Getting Past The Gatekeeper”

On Marketing To Small Businesses

A reader asks: “Michael, how can I get past the gatekeeper when I cold call? It seems like I always get stuck with the assistant. I feel like I’m banging my head up against a wall, day-in and day-out, trying to get through to the people who can buy my [widget]?” Dear Reader, Imagine the

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How to recapture “lost” customers and clients

On Local Business Marketing

One of my favorite lunch spots is a Mexican chain called Qdoba. Like many restaurants, they have a customer loyalty program. In a nutshell, the more you eat there, the more incentives they give you to keep coming back. It’s a good deal all around. This week, something happened with that program that impressed me,

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