We get off track sometimes and I guess this was my 45 year old self telling me to not take myself so seriously and enjoy the life I’ve lived. Several people have asked about the article, so I decided to republish it. I hope you get some lessons out of it too.

It was an absolute blast to be on the Dare To Dream Podcast and be interviewed by Gregory! I’ve had a long career in helping businesses grow and it was great to share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. We had a great conversation and I hope you get a chance to watch it or listen to it on Spotify!

Marketing effectively takes time, and time is money. To ensure you're using your time as efficiently as possible, you need to leverage metrics.

Modern entrepreneurs understand that time is fluid. Its value is not in stretches of time that you do something, but in the units themselves. We can charge down to the second for how long something takes and because of that, we are not constrained by day, night, weeks or even months.

We are conditioned to shoot for the stars at a very young age. “You can be anything you want to be!” our parents tell us. This tends to push us towards expectations that though are not out of reach, they take time to get there. And therein lies the rub, no one tells us how long it takes to be successful.

After working with small to medium sized businesses over the last 26 years, I’ve had a front row seat to view how most companies evolve. What works and what doesn’t, how to hire the best people and most importantly, how to grow.

I read a post the other day where the author said he doesn’t like to make a plan because it interferes with his creativity. He went on and on about how he is a strategic thinker and listed all the reasons why plans don’t work. Wait, what?

When your business is struggling it’s easy to focus on the wrong areas, which can inevitably make things worse. Here are some common areas that businesses mistakenly spend too much of their time on when businesses aren’t trained on how to process decisions correctly.

Companies are shuffling, reshaping and restructuring. Every day more and more people are appearing on LinkedIn appealing to their followers that they are #OpenToWork. It’s a hard trend to ignore. The fact that it’s happening so frequently is also concerning. Are we in a recession? Depends on who you ask. Is it because it’s an election year? Maybe.

In one of my Instagram posts at @weschyrchelconsulting I talked about removing the friction from your business. I've always been sensitive to the client/customer/employee onboarding experience. I think that sets the tone for how the rest of the relationship will be. Like they say, "you never get a second chance to make a first impression."

The other day I was lucky enough to hear from an old friend. He asked me a simple question, “What exactly do you do?” It caught me off guard a bit, because I have a section on my Home page that breaks down Consulting, Fractional COO, Advisor and Speaking. I also have a page called Services that goes into more detail of each of those areas. But really what he was asking was, What exactly are the situations where a business could benefit from one of your services?

Referrals are so valuable and yet they are the most difficult to get. A referral carries the most weight when it’s from an actual person. There are so many websites out there that list businesses and even search engines that have hundreds of thousands of businesses with 5 star reviews, yet we still put up a post on social media or ask a friend as the first step in finding a good referral. Why is that?