All businesses started accidentally.

Let’s start with this premise, “All businesses started accidentally.”  Think about it.  Think about the electrician who gets laid off and decides to start their electrical contracting business.  What about the engineer who has an idea for a product while he’s working for someone else?  What about the small-town merchant who has a passion for baby clothes and starts a store?  What about the online retailer...

After being out of college 10-years, seven of those years were spent managing others.  I managed technicians, engineers and sales people.  When I resigned the Fortune 500 company in 1997, I made a pact to myself that I would never hire employees.  I was tired of managing other people and then doing their jobs for them.

Little did I know, my desire to go solo was a pipedream.  Mathematically, it just couldn’t work.  Yes, I could make a great living on my...

What a question! While it’s a daunting question, it ought to be something all business owners who are believers ought to be asking themselves. Unfortunately, whether you work for a business as an employee or own a business, the church rarely talks about business matters. And, when they do, it’s often in a negative way.

If you read your Bible (also a great habit for a believer to have) you may be surprised how many times God talks about what he wants from your business. If you...

If you're an entrepreneur, you've heard the statistics that most small businesses overwhelmingly fail.

In my next six blog posts, I want to show you six elements of how to succeed in business, whatever it is you want to start. 

The first of these blog post topics is Finance.

Money Mindset

After I had started, grown and sold a multi-million dollar business, I decided to coach other small business owners. What took me by surprise were the strange ideas that many new business owners had...

As a Business Coach, here are some questions I get all the time from my clients and prospective clients:

• How can I better manage my time?
• What is my purpose in life?
• How do I set realistic goals?

As you can imagine, most human beings ask these questions and feel reluctant to answer them to their own satisfaction. 

I have read three books on this subject recently. Each book had a different approach to creating your life's priorities and managing your time to achieve what is important to...

Emily entered the bank for what she was sure would be the last time ever. 

She rarely went to the bank unless she had problems with her accounts. This time was different. This time, Emily was making the final payment on a loan she had taken out 10-years ago for her greenhouse and shop building. 

Emily owned a successful flower-shop and greenhouse. She managed to get contracts to supply her local grocery stores and a few other flower shops with flowers; plus she had a growing local...

Fred was a structural engineer. He started out working for a general contractor in the construction of small bridges at first; and then gradually worked his way up to some large projects. 

While he loved what he did, it was difficult to predict how much work his general contractor would get in any one year. The problem was that the only people that would hire Fred's company were municipalities who wanted a design-build bridge project. Since most bridges were designed by firms who were...

Tim couldn't believe it. He'd miss another deadline. He was working so hard. His wife was on his case for missing Peter's baseball game. 

With all that he had on his plate, he couldn't find time to complete an advertising campaign for one of his largest customers. Tim was buried and he didn't see a way out. On top of all of this overwhelm, he wasn't making a lot of money with his advertising agency. He didn't understand what was wrong. He worked hard, he had some decent customers; but he...

Emma had always been a creative person. 

In elementary school she always looked forward to art class. It didn't matter what the assignment was, Emma took it a completely different direction.

She remembers when she was in second grade all the students were supposed to create a windmill with a drinking straw and a folded paper propeller. Emma's windmill ended up being an animated work of art. When the wind blew, Emma's windmill showed an animated cat swatting at a ball of yarn. It had...

It was a gray, fall day as Frank laid his father to his final resting place.

His dad's death was sudden. No one expected it. He was only 65-years old.

While Frank was wrestling with the emotions that come with such a sudden loss, he had another major worry. What would he do with his dad's business? Frank worked with his dad in the restaurant business. Some day in the future, Frank would have taken over the business. In fact, Frank felt like he should have taken over his dad's restaurant years...