Posts Tagged ‘Strategy’
Small Business and Startups: Prepare For the Worst
Mike | May 13th, 2013Disaster strikes. Extreme weather events, fires, data storage failures, illness or even the death of a key team member can occur at any time and when something happens, will your small business be prepared? According to ReadWrite, 74% of small businesses do not have a disaster plan and 84% don’t even carry insurance against natural [...]
What Steve Jobs Can Teach Us About Management and Leadership
Ross | May 8th, 2013“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” – Henry Kissinger “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” - Peter Drucker “You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy.” – Steve Jobs Strong leadership without strong management can result [...]
Reputation and Community
Mike | April 29th, 2013A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about building relationships with your customers that are based on trust, loyalty, transparency, integrity, and honesty. While writing the post, I had in mind a project we have been working on at crowdSPRING for well over a year now. The team is really excited that in the next couple of [...]
Small Business and Startups: Cultivate Trust and Nurture Loyalty
Mike | April 15th, 2013Trust is a key for driver for your customers. Do they trust you to produce a great product? Do they trust you to deliver a reliable service? Do they trust you with their money and their time? Establishing trust with your customers takes time and consistency, but it also takes data and transparency. Companies rely [...]
Lean Business: Pivot Point
Mike | April 8th, 2013In 2010 the co-Founders of Burbn, a check-in app for mobile phones built on HTML5, raised $500,00o in seed funding for a service that was designed for quick mobile sharing between users. The co-Founders had labored for over a year on their app but it was not gaining traction and they were unhappy with its functionality and [...]
Lean Business: Do Unto Others*
Mike | April 1st, 2013The golden rule of word-of-mouth marketing: Be nice to thine customers and, lo, they shall be nice to you in return. The mechanical nuts and bolts behind this idea, in social psychology terminology, is represented by the concept of reciprocity. In short it referes to how people respond to a positive action with another positive action. [...]
Marketing and Selling to Squirrels
Ross | March 19th, 2013Attention span is the amount of time a person (or animal) can concentrate on something without becoming distracted. The attention span of a squirrel is one second. The attention span of a squirrel focusing on an acorn is 4 minutes, a huge increase! We’ll discuss acorns later (trust me, acorns are relevant to our conversation!), [...]
Lean Business: Office Space – A Meditation
Mike | March 18th, 2013Our lease is up at the end of the year and Ross and I have been discussing our options. We love our office: it has all of the features we need, plus a great location, fantastic light, a dramatic view of the downtown skyline, and plenty of space. Problem is, truth be told, it probably [...]
Lean vs. Mean – Small Business and Responsibility
Mike | February 11th, 2013I have written often about strategies small business can use to operate modestly, spend wisely, and reduce cost by taking a lean approach to operations, marketing, and production. At crowdSPRING we try hard to manage our business and our team using tactics and strategy that have allowed us to construct a sustainable business, provide value [...]
