Small Business Connected

If you do any amount of business travel, you'll want to listen to this podcast. With nearly a million flight miles between the two of us, we uncover travel tips and tricks (and hilarious stories) that could only come from experience. In it, we discuss how to get the most out of business travel, how to maximize the value of your time, tips and hacks to make travel more enjoyable, and what to do when things go wrong.

In this podcast, Modern da Vinci expert and business owner Seth Sinclair talks about how difficult it is for small businesses to succeed, how anxiety and stress build when business plans don’t pan out as expected, and how financial and other pressures can lead business owners to give up. He shares a personal and recent story about persisting through these challenges over a two-year period to finally achieve a foundation of success.

Negotiations can be tough. They are often high pressure, high stakes situations with tight deadlines and demanding stakeholders. Opinions and interests can differ widely among parties, and strong emotions may come into play. When we are under this type of pressure, we often find ourselves stumped. Our thinking narrows and our creative muscles feel constrained. The Principled Negotiation Method defined in Getting to Yes suggests several strategies to counteract this. The premise is that...

Preparation is essential to effective negotiation. If you wish to reach a fair and satisfactory deal, you need to enter the negotiation with a clear understanding of your interests, options, comparative data, and objective criteria. One of the most important data points to consider is your “Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement”. This serves as your “Plan B” to the negotiation. In other words, it is the best option you have and the one you will live with should you leave the...

Negotiation is a back-and-forth communication that is designed to reach an agreement among parties that have both shared and differing interests. We all deal with negotiating each day, whether on simple matters like what to eat for dinner to complex decisions involving high stakes business matters with multiple parties. The purpose of negotiations is to produce wise agreements as efficiently as possible while maintaining or strengthening relationships. In this brief podcast, we...

In this interview with Salomon Paredes of E2 Outlook, we uncover some hidden truths about why website development and social media management is difficult, and discuss the purpose of each for small business owners.

Glen Hellman is a business expert and strategist that writes and presents on the topic of “How To Pitch to the Reptilian Brain.” It’s an approach grounded in neuroscience that is designed to influence others and move them to action. In this interview, Glen shares his insights on how to use these principles to sharpen your business’s sales pitch and how they can improve your leadership and business in general.

You have a tremendous, untapped advantage as a small business. Something that even the biggest companies can't compete with. Something that will inspire loyalty, productivity, and pride in every one of your employees. It’s called the “big picture.” Whether it’s your purpose statement, a larger project goal, or a combination of both, the big picture is the reason your employees head into work every morning. In this podcast, we’ll uncover why sharing the big picture is so powerful and give...

Having a strategy is vital for any small business. A strategy defines your plan for moving from where you are today to where you want your business to be in the future. On a more tactical level, having a clearly articulated business strategy is essential to being able to prioritize, build consensus, make decisions, and assess progress toward your goals. Unfortunately, the “classic” approach to strategic planning doesn’t work very well for small businesses. The traditional methods found in...

In this interview with Brian Roberts, founder and CEO of Croix Connect, we explore two things that often hold small businesses back from growing and what business owners can do to overcome them. Brian shares his substantial experience as a business advisor, coach, and Vistage CEO Peer Advisory Group Chair to offer insights on how essential it is for business owners to embrace trust and delegation.