When you’re a small business owner who’s selling the highest level of service possible how do you scale for continued business growth? With caution. If what your selling is service and not widgets you have to be very careful on how you grow. I’ve turned down several “opportunities” to expand my business that would have diluted(…)
Small business
Flight to Vegas
I recently took a business trip to Las Vegas. I’ve gone there at least once a year for the past 8 years. I’ve left from cities all over the U.S. and the scene on the departing flight is the same every time. Everyone’s happy. Everyone’s hamming it up with their seat mate whether they knew(…)
Guerilla Marketing
My business, Athletic Lab, has been open for almost a year now. Business has picked up slowly but steadily throughout the year. Overall, a little slower than my usual fatally optimistic expectations but growth is good nonetheless and we’ve moved beyond the proverbial tipping point that all businesses must reach before they either fail or(…)
Battling Burnout
For the past couple months, I’ve been putting in 75 hour weeks at Athletic Lab. Days typically start at 6am (with the first training session at 7) and end around 7 or 8pm. Add to that about 10-12 hours between Saturday and Sunday. And 2-3 speaking engagements a month that take me out of town.(…)
Working In or Working On Your Business
Over the past month one of the realizations I’ve made is that I’m spending too much time working IN my business and not enough time working ON my business. Part of this is to be expected being a small business owner on a new venture. I’ve had Athletic Lab open for 4 months now and(…)
The Benefits of Diversifying Revenue Streams
I’ve now been in NC for a little over 6 months and I’ve had Athletic Lab fully operational for about 7 weeks. Business at Athletic Lab has been modest but growing steadily. In an odd twist of fate, the very things I thought I’d be counting on as major profit centers are lagging behind expectations(…)
Expecting the Unexpected
Well, I’ve had a whirlwind couple weeks since my last post. In many ways it’s been painfully slow waiting to hear back on things. In other cases things have changed fast and furious. I’ll lay out the developments over a series of shorter posts. The quick low-down is that my situation with the Impact facility(…)
Small business owners must be jack of all trades
Long time since my last post. Been very busy writing my dissertation as well as making some changes to ELITETRACK and totally redoing the store and services section of the HPC site. I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of web work lately on my various sites. With the HPC site the changes were business(…)
A Shoe Deal for HPC?
My business partner had a meeting with an international shoe company yesterday. It looks like somethings going to come of it. This company has a major international presence but is just starting to get in to the U.S. They want to use us for product testing because they are getting in to a new market(…)