Briggs Solutions for Business

Briggs Solutions for Business Supporting business professionals in leading successful personal and professional lives.

09/01/2026

September. School is back, summer is over, and the slow season excuse expires today.

Every owner I work with has a list of operational fixes they have been deferring since spring. The CRM nobody finished setting up. The pricing that has not been reviewed in two years. The role that was supposed to be hired in May.

Those things do not get easier in Q4. They get more expensive, because by then you are trying to fix the plumbing while the house is full.

Pick one. Put a date on it this month. Tell someone else the date so it costs you something to miss it.

That is the entire method. It is not sophisticated, and it works.

What is the one thing on your deferred list?

08/30/2026

August closes tomorrow. Two thirds of 2026 is gone.

Here is the uncomfortable math. If the plan for the last four months looks like the plan for the first eight, you are not planning. You are repeating.

The businesses that finish strong are not the ones who work harder in Q4. They are the ones who changed something structural in September and let it compound for ninety days.

One process that gets documented. One report that gets built. One decision that stops running through you.

Small, structural, and started now. That is what makes December look different.

What is the one thing you would change if you knew it had to be in place by October 1?

08/28/2026

Labor Day weekend is next week, and for a lot of Maine businesses it is the last big revenue weekend of the season.

What happens after it is the part most owners plan badly.

The shoulder season is not a slow period to survive. It is the period that funds your winter, and the decisions that determine it are being made right now: how much you staff, what you stock, whether you discount to move inventory or hold price and protect margin.

The businesses that come out of October in decent shape are the ones who decided in August what the shoulder season was for.

The ones that struggle are the ones who ran the last big weekend hard and then looked up in mid-September wondering where everyone went.

Pull last year's September and October numbers today. Not next month.

What does your shoulder season need to fund this year?

08/26/2026

Women's Equality Day.

Women-owned businesses have been one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. small business economy for years. They are also consistently among the least likely to be capitalized at the level their growth actually requires.

I bring that up because the advice women founders get most often is about confidence, and the constraint I see most often is structural.

Underpriced services that were never revisited. No line of credit arranged before it was needed. A business that outgrew the systems holding it up, with the owner personally absorbing the difference in hours nobody sees.

Confidence is not the gap. Pricing, capital access, and operating structure are, and all three are fixable with the right support.

I would rather spend today talking about those than about mindset.

If you are building one, tell me what you are working on. I read every comment.

08/24/2026

A lead that waits four hours for a reply is usually already someone else's customer.

Most small businesses respond to new inquiries in hours. The ones winning those inquiries respond in minutes, consistently, including at 8pm on a Saturday.

Owners hear that and assume the answer is to try harder. It is not. Nobody wins that race manually, and the ones trying are burning themselves out to do it.

The answer is a workflow you build one time.

Form submission triggers an immediate text and email. The lead lands in a pipeline stage with an owner attached. If nobody touches it in an hour, it escalates. If the lead goes quiet, a follow up sequence runs for two weeks without anyone thinking about it.

That is roughly an afternoon of setup in HighLevel. It runs for years.

Speed to lead is one of the few advantages a small business can build faster than a large one. Most simply never do.

How fast does your business actually respond right now? Be honest.

08/22/2026

Late August is when seasonal staff start giving notice.

Here is the question that matters more than who is leaving: if that person walked out Monday, what leaves with them?

The vendor who always answers. The customer who needs a call before every delivery. The workaround for the thing in the system that has never been fixed.

None of that is written down anywhere, because it never had to be.

Institutional knowledge feels like loyalty until the day it becomes risk. Then it is just a business that cannot operate without one specific human being available.

You do not need a hundred page manual. You need the twenty things only one person knows, captured somewhere the next person can find them.

Do it before the resignation, not in the two weeks after it.

Who in your business is a single point of failure right now?

08/20/2026

Every August I notice the same shift in my clients.

The out-of-office replies stop. Threads get longer. Somebody finally answers a question I asked in July.

Summer in Maine is not a slow season, it is a differently busy one. But a particular clarity shows up around the third week of August, when the calendar gets structured again and you can finally see the business instead of just reacting to it.

Here is what I would spend that clarity on.

Most small businesses I sit down with are not failing at strategy. They are failing at retrieval.

The information exists. Who called, what they wanted, what was promised, when to follow up. It just lives in six places, and no two people can see the same version of it.

That is a design problem, not a character problem. You built the systems when the business was small enough to hold in your head, and then the business outgrew them without sending a notice.

The fix is unglamorous. One place where the customer relationship lives, and automation doing the remembering so your people do not have to.

For most of my clients that is HighLevel, because it absorbs the scheduling, texting, forms, and follow-up tools they were already paying for separately. But the platform matters less than the decision to stop running a business out of your own recall.

If August handed you a little breathing room, spend it here. It compounds for years.

What is the one thing in your business that only works because you remember to do it?

08/18/2026

How many leads came into your business last month?

If answering that takes opening three tabs and asking someone else, the problem is not your memory.

It is that your customer information does not live anywhere. It lives in a text thread, an inbox, a notebook in someone's truck, and the head of the person who has been there longest.

That is not a discipline failure. It is a design failure, and it is extremely common in businesses doing seven figures.

Here is the test I use. Pick one customer from six months ago. Without asking anyone, can you reconstruct how they found you, what you quoted, what you promised, and when you last touched base?

If not, you do not have a data problem. You have a system of record problem, and every marketing dollar you spend is landing in a bucket with a hole in it.

Try the test. What did you find?

08/16/2026

Most owners are running the second half of 2026 on a plan they wrote in January and have not opened since.

Mid-August is the honest checkpoint. Not because the calendar says so, but because you now have seven months of real data instead of seven months of assumptions.

Three questions worth an hour this week:

Which revenue line actually performed the way you projected, and which one have you been quietly propping up?

What did you say yes to in Q1 that you would not say yes to today?

If you had to cut one commitment to protect the last four months, which one goes?

The plan is not the point. The willingness to revise it is.

Which of those three is hardest for you to answer honestly?

One of the reasons I started and still run my businesses is simple: I wanted to follow my heart. I’ve always been passio...
07/20/2026

One of the reasons I started and still run my businesses is simple: I wanted to follow my heart. I’ve always been passionate about creating positive experiences, for the customers buying what we sell, and for the employees who show up every day to help sell it.

Here’s what I coach clients through often. When you’re deep in the day-to-day of running a business, it’s easy to lose sight of the why. Why did we start this? What was the motivation? The hours get long. The questions and hurdles feel endless. And at some point, a lot of founders reach a moment where they want to quit the very job they created.

If that’s you right now, here’s what I want you to know: losing your passion for something you once loved doesn’t mean it’s the end of the line. It usually just means it’s time to recalibrate.

And recalibration is hard to do alone. You’re better off working with someone who can help guide you and support you through it, the same way anyone building something worth keeping needs a second set of eyes.

If that’s you, reach out. We’d love to help you find your way back to the path your heart set you on in the first place.

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