10 Keys to Exponential Growth

A while back I posted on the difference between invention and iteration. This post is about innovation and how iteration is a necessary but limiting activity. Innovation is important at any company. For software companies its life or death. For early stage companies innovation is actually pretty easy. I think this is due to a [...]

Man, I gotta stop doing that. There is a great post on HBR about asking better questions and listening; in it, John Baldoni suggests being curious (check), being open-minded (anything’s possible), being engaged (most of the time) and finally digging deeper (not frequently enough). More often than not I’m just waiting for the other person [...]

As a successful business matures, there comes a pressure from shareholders and investors to innovate and find new tributaries of opportunity. Once a company has blossomed to the point where their core business begins to level off, there seems no choice but to take risk, double down, and push forward towards a new source of [...]

I stumbled upon a really amazing B2B marketing eBook from Velocity Marketing Group in the UK. Among the many nuggets of useful mindshare, they give this definition of Thought Leadership: “The exploiting your unique position in your markets to generate valuable insight and advice on issues your customers and prospects care most about” Leads360 has [...]

It has such a nice ring to it. 2009 turned out to be a pretty darn good year me and for my company Leads360. I had twin babies, Wolf and Dahlia and my company posted more than 50% growth. It wasn’t all easy though. This year was both challenging and demanding. I found myself in [...]

You can easily see how not having enough resources can stall growth; but I’ve noticed a phenomenon whereby your growth potential is actually limited by the resources of your organization. While it may be obvious that you can’t grow if you don’t have enough sales people or spend enough on marketing, what I mean is [...]

Many hours have been spent in board rooms strategizing over how to grow a business.  Certainly America’s widely different companies and entrepreneurs have shown that there continue to be new ways to accomplish this. But I suspect a commonly debated growth strategy is whether or not to grow through iteration of the core, or through [...]

I’ve been dragging on my 10 keys to exponential growth series, but I really need to get some of this out. I’ve discussed R&R before, but I want to reiterate how critical I think this aspect of business building is. When I first started as an entrepreneur I never even considered writing a role description. [...]

First and foremost, get the mission, vision and values right. This has been somewhat of a chore for me over the years. I think I’ve done three or four revisions, maybe more; but even as I tune the mission and vision, our core values and core purpose have not changed dramatically. I think that Jim [...]

As an entrepreneur, I think one of the most common and difficult challanges is the inevitable transition that occurs when you try to grow beyond your own reach. What I mean by this is that most entrepreneurs start small. Like me, I started in my living room on more than one occassion. Eventually I grew [...]