ReviveSolutions.com

12/04/2020

Insight:
Some small businesses may be throwing away easy money by not developing a strategy to keep earning their customer's loyalty.

Why focus on growing loyalty? "Loyalty leaders grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers." Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2020/01/are-you-undervaluing-your-customers

So how do you figure out where to focus your marketing efforts to get the best loyalty?

QuickBooks data, with some manipulation, can give you some great insights but can be hard to extract. If you know someone who would like help in this area, please have them contact me.

02/10/2019

Strategic thoughts on agency selection: One friend recently asked about how to select an agency when all proposals look great. Here are a few of my initial thoughts, plus a few more:
- Interview past clients who have used the agency more than 5 times in the last X years.
- Since each agency only shows their best examples, ask "under what constraints was this designed?" Great agencies, in my experience, demonstrate brilliance despite serious time, resource, knowledge etc. limitations.
- Accountability for results is also an effective way to separate the "wheat from the chaff". Meaning that if the agency knows the ROI and/or had to adjust based on client results then you will know if their portfolio is simply cooked up in a lab, or has undergone serious stress testing.
+ How much effort and research was completed, over and above minimum expectations? Was the agency aware of their own biases and took steps to overcome them?
+ Ask the agency to evaluate your proposed project against their optimum state. If they feel you are mostly similar to previous projects then ask about fixed pricing (most will run screaming from the room ... metaphorically speaking).

09/29/2018

Strategic Insight: How often do you really test your theories before you implement a business decision? , , ,

A terrifying choice, but what would you really do? This video takes analysis out of theory into reality. An obviously insufficient sample size but a compelling story. Are we entering into a renaissance of science interest for the masses?

Would you reroute a train to run over one person to prevent it from running over five others? In the classic “Trolley Problem” survey, most people say they w...

02/18/2017

The value of fanaticism (not religious) = androgenous motivation drives the curiosity of fanatics. Very interesting TedMed talk by Vivienne Ming.

What do you do when you don't have to do anything? I enjoy practicing ROI.

https://youtu.be/o4ckVXyruks

Entrepreneur and theoretical neuroscientist Vivienne Ming describes how we can best harness and maximize our human potential, and the personal transformation...

11/22/2016

Do you or your leaders settle for "half-assed answers"? Do you push for greatness? Tony Robbins: http://www.inc.com/tony-robbins/simple-rule-for-leading-an-engaging-meeting.html?cid=readmorevideoimage

Tony Robbins, life coach and author of Money: Master the Game , explains why you can't tolerate distractions.

11/04/2016

An older article: marketing is an SMB's second biggest challenge running a business (see Dragon's Den survey at the bottom):
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/10-surprising-stats-about-small-business-in-canada-1.1083238

A breakdown of what small businesses contribute to the Canadian economy.

11/04/2016

Considering developing a Wordpress site and using this Q&A tool. Does anyone have an opinion on this type of question and answer voting plugin?
https://wordpress.org/plugins/cm-answers/

Enables users to post questions and answers (Q&A) in a stack overflow style. Includes voting, moderation, notifications, access control and more.

11/04/2016

USA vs Canada, by the numbers:
http://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/united-states.canada/geography

11/04/2016

Useful small business SMB/SME Canadian facts:
http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/061.nsf/eng/h_02689.html

This semi-annual publication provides information on the most frequently asked questions pertaining to small businesses in Canada.

11/04/2016

Out of 1.16 million businesses in Canada 1.43 million are SMB. https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/061.nsf/eng/03021.html

As of December 2015, there were 1.17 million employer businesses in Canada. Of these, 1.14 million (97.9 percent) businesses were small businesses, 21,415 (1.8 percent) were medium-sized businesses and 2,933 (0.3 percent) were large enterprises.

11/04/2016

Well worded tax advice for SME/SMB business owners in Canada.
http://madanca.com/blog/tax-write-offs-for-small-business-in-canada-by-accountant-toronto/

Find out what the tax write-offs for a small business in Canada are, and how they can save you money on taxes.

10/28/2016

Interesting one page summary on agile project management: http://blog.crisp.se/2016/10/09/miakolmodin/poster-on-agile-in-a-nutshell-with-a-spice-of-lean

This is a poster I made for a Agile intro class on Hyper Island Digital Business class 2017 where I and my colleague Per Lundholm was last week. The class was as big as 40 people, and covering from a couple of experts to mostly total novelty, which is usually the most difficult type of situation for...