Accelerated Growth Consulting

I was at a conference this past week when one of the speakers, a copywriter by the name of Ray Edwards, nailed me–in a positive way. The way he got to me was by asking two simple questions. Showing a picture of a MacDonald’s hamburger, he asked, 1. How would you describe the quality of [...]

I remember hearing Dan Kennedy (a marketing expert) say, years ago, “What’s interesting about entrepreneurs is that they won’t pay for the soft stuff (like dealing with their fears or lack of confidence), but they will pay for the hard stuff (like how to use some new technique on the internet to attract more customers), [...]

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time you know that my first premise for growth is, “No organization can consistently perform at a level beyond the capacity of the senior leader. Therefore, if you want to grow an organization, you need to start by growing the senior leader first.” In essence, [...]

Regardless of whether you’re a basketball fan or not, you have to admire what Phil Jackson accomplished yesterday, as well as over the past 18 seasons he’s served as a head coach (similar to your role as the senior executive of a SMB). With yesterday’s NBA championship with the Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson probably [...]

If you haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book on Outliers, you may want to soon. While I don’t agree with all his conclusions (the difficult part of using case studies and statistics is that conclusions are subjective), I do think his commentary is fascinating and worth reading. One of the dominant themes is that what [...]

If you’re an entrepreneur or senior executive of a small or medium-sized business, hopefully you’re regularly reading Inc. Magazine. If not, you should be. I rarely find an issue where I’m not tearing out a few articles to file. And that holds true for this month’s edition, which marks their 30th anniversary. However, my favorite [...]

When did “flip-flopping” become a sign of weakness? If you don’t regularly read Business Week, you ought to at least peruse the back page when you’re near a copy–if for no other reason than to read what Jack Welch has to say. This week’s edition (3/9/09) was one of those weeks that every leader should [...]

I wish I had come up with that headline, but alas it's not mine. It's the title of a free audio program by the the Dean of the Regent University School of Global Leadership and Entrepreneurship, Bruce WInston. And it's not just a cute title, it's actually a true recounting of his experience in Fairbanks [...]

I attended a reception last evening for the Montgomery County (Maryland) Delegation sponsored by Leadership Montgomery (and specifically my class of 2000). As we were finishing up , I was in a conversation with a former school principal of a prestigious high school in our county and we happened to be discussing issues related to [...]

The number one response for most people when asked why they don’t pursue their dreams is  . . . "I just don’t have enough time." Well, the reason why we often struggle with that is because we often think that addition comes before subtraction—but that’s rarely true in real life.  In real life, most of [...]