Accelerated Growth Consulting

When your prospects and customers think about you, do they think, “I have to have that!” Or, “I need to go there!” Or “I need to use them!” Or is it more of a more of a, “Let me think about it.” Or a “I’ll get back to you.” Or, “I’m doing my due diligence,” [...]

Have you ever set out to create a system in your business that deliberately irritated or disappointed your customers? Probably not. But if I asked, “Have you ever done so?” The answer would probably be, “Yes!” I had one of those experiences the other week. I was speaking at a convention in Orlando that was [...]

I was working out at the gym this afternoon, watching “Pirates of the Caribbean,” on USA (yes, it is difficult to workout on the elliptical these days :-) when I noticed, down at the bottom left hand corner of the screen, the following words, In Plain Sight  All New Season Sunday, April 19th 10/9C As [...]

Seth Godin has done it again. Last week, while on vacation, I finally got a chance to read Seth's book entitled, "Tribes," and loved it. The basic premise is that throughout history, tribes (composed of a leader, a group and an idea) have primarily been ruled by geography. However, the internet has changed all that. [...]

Fortune magazine recently came out with their listing of the Fortune 500 (and 1000). A quick survey of the Fortune 500 shows that the company with the best performing stock return over the past decade has been . . . Apple–at an impressive 50.7% return per year. So, how did they do that? From my [...]

If you could achieve Wolfgang Puck’s success, would you? If you could go from being a young Austrian boy who was fired from his first cooking job to being a world renown chef and restauranteur with a global brand that includes 15 top rated restaurants (including the famous Spago Beverly Hills), 80 Gourmet Express locations, [...]

Whether you like watching American Idol or not, this season’s favorite to win, David Cook, has demonstrated a number of important principles that can help any small business win in the marketplace. 1. It’s Okay Not to Be First Out of the Blocks. Every year I skip the auditions (obviously, since I run a company [...]

It doesn’t matter whether a company is large or small, profit or non-profit, retail or  manufacturing, services or product-driven, the number one marketing sin is still the same–being ordinary (or boring). In fact, virtually every market in every category is awash in a sea of sameness. We see the same products and services marketed in [...]

How many times have you been in a retail location that had a “customer loyalty” program that didn’t really work? Not that the cashier didn’t know how to punch the card, but that the store really didn’t stand behind the offer? Or to put it another way, where you felt like the management had a [...]

Regardless of which political party you’re in, or which presidential election you pick out of the past fifty years, the winner has almost always been the most likable of the two candidates (for example, Kennedy over Nixon, Carter over Ford, Reagan over Carter, Bush I over Dukakis, Clinton over Bush I, Bush II over Gore, [...]