Good morning from Fritz! As you know, I help mom with her business and periodically need to weigh in here at her blog. We were talking on our walk yesterday about how I size up the competition so I thought I would share it with you too. Generally, I take mom for a walk around our neighborhood in the morning. Â There are three types of greetings we receive from the other dogs in the neighborhood who are in or around their homes. There are three types of reactions we get and it is the same in business. Type One – Don’t Step In My Territory. Â These are the dogs, er… I mean people who don’t want you in their space. They don’t care what you are doing, what you want or anything about you. They just want you out of their space. Some of them […] Continue reading
Brains Are Not For Picking
I do a lot of networking – like 24 hours a month. I meet many new people and some of them are really cool. My least favorite thing to hear when meeting a new person is, “I would love to pick your brain”. Yeah, I know. Now don’t get me wrong. When I first started my business I found this flattering. I would schedule coffee with the person, usually have to buy my own, sit and tell them the answers to many of their questions. They walked away feeling great about me and I knew I had helped someone. Go me. But over time I realized these people weren’t then sending me business or in some way returning the favor. Somehow they felt entitled to receiving free information and I had just done what I’m suppose to do. In fact the only referrals I got […] Continue reading
Do You Participate?
I had a wonderful opportunity today to speak to the Society of Human Resource Management group in Medina today. Â Tomorrow I will be speaking to a group from the Akron Chamber on LinkedIn. Â Last week I did a session with the Young Entrepreneurs Academy. Â In each session, you could clearly see who came for a reason and who came because they had to do so. Â And it got me thinking…. When you go to a meeting, why are you there? Â Do you know? Â Can you answer? Â I’m on the programming committee for the Medina Chamber and we plan speakers for meetings. Â There are those who believe the speaker topic is the reason people come out. Â One person told me attendance is largely driven by the weather and in bad weather people stay home. Â So does that mean a truly compelling topic would motivate them to […] Continue reading