87Plus Blog

Does this gardening incident sound familiar? “My son ran over my rosebush with the lawn mower. I thought for sure it was dead! But to my amazement, it came back stronger and more vibrant than ever.” It seems like most of us have a gardening incident somewhere in our past. Aside from teaching your son to spare the shrubbery, there is a business lesson in this gardening incident, too. It’s about pruning for growth.

It’s arguable that the same vision, hard work, techniques and patience that are required to grow a vibrant garden are also required to grow a vibrant business. Just like gardening, growing a business is a blend of science, art, and practice.

When something good or bad happens, or when we have an idea, we want to share it. When we have a question, we want to ask it. When we are frustrated, we want to vent.

Sharing our news, ideas, questions and frustrations whenever the urge strikes, consumes an incalculable amount of time and human energy, and that matters because many of us say we don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want to accomplish.

I used to think of an executive assistant as a luxury that only high-powered CEOs in large companies could afford. It seemed silly to pay someone to do something I could do myself, and I figured that it would take more time to explain what I needed than to do it on my own. But as my company grew, I realized that delegation is not a luxury—it's a necessity. 

Ever notice how everyone in a workplace knows who the bad boss is—except the bad boss? If you’re supervising others, and you’re frustrated with their performance, it’s possible that the problem isn’t your team. You could be the not-so-great boss.

Disengaged employees cost the U.S. more than $500 billion in lost productivity annually, and most of that disengagement can be traced back to poor leadership and management. From large corporations to small marketing agencies, the impact of a bad boss can have catastrophic consequences to morale, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

Meetings are often seen as the most useless part of business life, but they don’t have to be.  In fact, meetings can be an important tool for driving your company’s growth, but they have to be run effectively for your team to get value and stop viewing them as a waste of time.

As an entrepreneur and advisor to business leaders, I always have a stack of books sitting on my desk that have been recommended to me by friends and colleagues. Each year, I compile a list of books that have either stuck with me year after year, or have emerged as new favorites in the last year. 

As you build your reading list for the coming year, here are some books to consider adding to your list! I plan to buy all of them in bulk and regularly recommend them to clients and colleagues in 2017. 

When I first started my company, I thought it would be all rainbows and unicorns. I had a lot of fantasies about how much better my lifestyle would be when I didn’t work for “the man,” which is probably why I spent most of my time depressed and anxious when reality finally set in. The financial roller coaster, the feast-or-famine nature of project work, and the loneliness of being a solo-entrepreneur was not what I had in mind.