‘The Best Damn Small Business Newsletter on the Internet’ archives

Traditional, structured business plans usually include business descriptions, SWOT analyses, market research, financial projections, and various strategic breakdowns (eg sales strategy, marketing strategy, etc). And, at the veryyy beginning, in the executive summary,...

Great business planning (and New Year's resolution-ing) involves a lot of intentionality, self-reflection (on both yourself and your business), and reviewing business stats (like financials, CRM data, etc). You need to take a hard look at your business, what's...

Everyone's first experience with a SWOT analysis is terrible. It's typically your first real exposure to business strategy and you just don't have enough experience in your business yet (because you're a business student, new entrepreneur, new to business...

"Rank your clients then fire the bottom-tier ones" is classiccc business advice. And, it's relatively good advice (as far as soundbites go). You shoulddd periodically prune your client list and fire the clients that are causing excessive hardship, stress, and internal...

There's all sorts of goal-setting frameworks and theories (eg SMART criteria, OKRs, BHAGs, OGSMs, etc)*. They're supposed to help get your rough goals & dreams out of your head, onto a piece of paper, and into a standardized structure that makes sense which can...

Constantly learning, iterating, testing, and evolving helps keep your business ahead of new challenges and beating the competition. New innovations can be as simple as new software tools, addon services, or updated deliverables, but can make your business...

True growth is incredibly slow. It's a series of marginal improvements over a long enough period of time until you finally become proficient or successful. For example, they say it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert (which is debatable, but this is just an...