5 Quick(ish) Thoughts On Luck, Survival, and Success
Behold! Some useful and provocative business musings to make your life and business better. ************************ Beware Of Advice From Successful, Lucky Idiots A strong operator can handle a crappy market. An amazing market can prop up a sloppy operator. The right...
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Getting More Leads By Multiplying Your Clients: 4 Questions For Effective Referral Programs
We all know word of mouth from satisfied customers is the cheapest, easiest, and best way to grow your business. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a relatively new business owner to brag about “not doing any marketing.” And to be sure, organic growth from word of mouth...
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That Moment When You Question Everything: Is This My Midlife Crisis?
[Disclaimer: This is not a typical post for a business blog (maybe it should be?). So if you’re not ready for some raw, unfiltered emotion, this may not be the post for you.] Right now, as I’m typing this, I am having a moment when I am questioning everything....
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Consistently Excellent: 5 Keys to Train Your Team on Systems Mastery
Any leader knows the only way to succeed in business is through creating systems. Good systems provide clearly documented procedures for how business is conducted. This leads to consistency for the experience of clients and customers, and a team of people who have a...
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What’s Cash Flow And Why Should You Give A Sh*t?
You have heard the expression cash is king, right? Well, in business that couldn't be more true. Let's start with the basics. What is cash flow? Cash flow is the total amount of money being transferred into and out of your business on a regular basis....
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The Ultimate Booklist for Entrepreneurs: 48 Books to Supercharge Your Business
For anyone who knows me in real life or follows me on the interwebz, it’s no secret I have a problem. You see… I’m a junkie. Every day I wake up and live a life of servitude to my addiction. It’s all consuming. It’s obsessive. And at times, it’s truly a burden for...
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A Brief (Motivating?) Rant About Why You Should Do Less, But Better
Allow me a brief moment to rant. I’m not promising that it will be productive, but it will be passionate. There is a subset of business coaches and thought leaders peddling dangerous ideas like you can have it all if you’re willing to hustle, and if you’re not...
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How To Use Public Speaking to Establish Authority and Grow Your Business (Even If You Hate Speaking In Public): Part 2
In the first part of our deep dive into public speaking, we covered how to create a structure that sets you up for success. By crafting a strong opening and ending, logically ordering your content, and designing a strong slide deck, you’re off to a great start. (Did...
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How To Use Public Speaking to Establish Authority and Grow Your Business (Even If You Hate Speaking In Public): Part 1
According to conventional wisdom, most people fear public speaking more than death. While this sounds extreme at first, upon reflection, it does follow a certain logic. After all, we’ve been designed by natural selection to feel a healthy dose of nerves anytime...
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MFF’s Best Blog Post of 2018 (And What You Can Learn From It)
One of the most common issues I heard from business leaders in 2018 was how difficult it can be to create online content that gets traction. With so much noise on our social platforms these days and the rising cost of online advertising, it can harder than ever for...
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Know Your Numbers: A Non-Intimidating Overview of Key Performance Indicators
There comes a point in every business’s life where it’s time to grow up. In the beginning, many businesses are run with a heavy focus on getting leads and customers. The bank account is closely watched, but only so we can be certain to not run out of cash. Over time,...
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10 Quick Tips for Building Community
In the past year, I’ve worked with over one hundred business leaders. And in all of those interactions, there was one topic that arose the most frequently. Every business owner wants to know how to build community. It’s not enough these days to just have a solid...
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How to Create a Daily Gratitude Practice and 5 Reasons You Should Have One as a Leader
First things, first. What the heck is a daily gratitude practice? There are many definitions of gratitude depending on the research you look at, but I like to think of gratitude as the acknowledgment of positive outcomes in your life and the reasons for those positive...
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16 Ways To Improve Your Customer Service, Part 2: Grow Your Revenue and Increase Retention By “Giving A Sh*t”
And without further ado, let’s take a deep dive into the second half of our two part series and learn more ways to up-level your customer service. In part two, we’ll cover: The perils of standardizing “wow” momentsHow to stand out by actually being a real live...
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16 Ways To Improve Your Customer Service, Part 1: Grow Your Revenue and Increase Retention By “Giving A Sh*t”
Call me old-fashioned, but I find great customer service inspiring. Based on your industry, customer service can take many forms. It can be an expertly prepared and served meal. It can be a thoughtfully curated travel experience. It can simply be a warm and personal...
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The Missing Link for Leaders: 3 Ways to Improve Your Business by Improving Yourself
Most leaders think of their work in two categories, working in your business and working on your business. When you are working in your business you are engrossed in the day-to-day operations and are often focused on being a manager. Managers create structure and...
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Want to Manage Your Time Better? Start Here.
You know what’s crazy? Time. It’s your only completely non-renewable resource. You can get more energy by resting. And you can always earn more money. But once time is gone… that’s it. If you’re serious about using your time well, it’s important to start by analyzing...
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Done-For-You Presentation: 10 Tips to Improve Your Team’s Email Etiquette
No one ever teaches us how to use email. One day we're handed an email address and it's assumed we'll just figure it out. [Spoiler alert: We're not very good at just figuring it out.] So, it makes perfect sense that for many of us emails are a source of frequent...
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Become a Learning Machine: How to Leverage Books to Supercharge Personal and Professional Development
Estimated Reading Time: 10 Minutes I’ve been reading (or listening to) an average of two to three books a week since August of 2010. At the time of this writing, I can safely estimate I’ve read more than a thousand books over the last eight years. I...
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5 Phrases That Will Make You A Better Leader
As a leader, you have an outsized impact on those around you. That impact can be a positive one in which you help others be more productive, empowered and inspired. Or your impact can be a negative one leaving those you lead feeling confused, frustrated or...
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Don’t Go It Alone: How to Fight Entrepreneurial Loneliness and Find Community
When I was in middle school, I started obsessively studying musical theater. I would go to the library and check out various cast albums, then make cassette tape recordings. Since I planned to go into the field, I was determined to study the genre and...
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Our Free System for Managing Customer Experience
At Mark Fisher Fitness (MFF) feedback is our greatest currency. When we foster an open dialogue between our team and our Ninjas (aka clients) our culture and community thrive as a result. With the currency of feedback, you can buy what we all seek in our...
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From New Hire To Superstar: The Principles of Effective Onboarding
Teamwork! Makes the dream work! Unless you screw up onboarding. In which case… Teamwork! Makes your business unravel, enrages your clients, and sends you to bankruptcy court! Ok, that may be a bit extreme. But it’s fair to say that if you don’t have a...
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The Power of Emotion on Purchasing Behavior
Guest Post by Chris Burgess, Business for Unicorns Adjunct Faculty and Founder of Lift the Bar “People buy using emotion” is one the of the most common phrases in marketing and sales across the three different industries I have been lucky to have been a part...
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All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful
All models are wrong but some are useful. I’ve used this phrase a million times when talking about business models because it sounds super smart. But I wasn’t sure where it came from. So so I did a little digging. Turns out, this axiom was made popular by...
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51/49 or 49/51?: A Provocative Question Regarding Business Growth, Self-Knowledge, and Making Good Art
Dearest reader, today I take a brief pause from tactical musings to offer you a thought experiment that may make you uncomfortable. If there’s one thing that consistently destroys beautiful businesses, it’s looking to scale at all costs. Growing a business can be a...
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How to Completely Change Your Relationship to Feedback
I am an education junkie. Show me a workshop, book or conference that could help me expand my thinking or help me make a better impact on the world and I am all in. Recently I went to the best conference I’ve attended to date -- the 2018 WorkHuman Conference, created...
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Creating Effective In-Services: A Done-For-You System To Train Your Team
As covered previously on this blog, meetings are often a boring waste of time that take us away from our actual job.But it doesn’t have to be that way. Meetings can be a place for brainstorming to find solutions. They can be a place for vigorous debate to...
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Stop Doubting Yourself: 10 Ways to Overcome Analysis Paralysis
We all do it. Faced with a tough decision, we pause to think about it. Then we keep thinking about it, and thinking about it, and thinking about it. We analyze to the point where we’re incapable of making a decision and taking action. Some of us rarely find ourselves...
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How to Onboard New Clients for Long Term Relationships
The beginning of any relationship is always a delicate thing. You’re setting the tone for how things are going to go. Your actions and behaviors are telling the story of how you’ll be showing up for the other party. And understandably, the other party makes a lot of...
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How to Build Instant Rapport and Trust by Being a Better Listener
Most of us are crappy listeners. We think we’re paying attention, but we’re not. All too often we’re just waiting for our chance to talk. Or we’re judging what the other person is saying so that we can quickly agree or disagree. Or we are lost in our own mental...
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Why Motivating Your Team Isn’t Working: 3 Ways to Use Incentives and Accountability without Crushing Souls
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery Incentives are a tricky thing. To some extent, all...
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3 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your First Team Member
One of the most important decisions you will make when you are starting or growing your business is who to hire as your first team member. While hiring the right people for your team is always important, making your first hire as a new business is uniquely critical....
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A Quick and Dirty System for Goal Setting: A Done-For-You 60 Minute Workshop To Live An Intentional Life
Periodic goal-setting is one of the most important things you can do if you want to be sure you’re on the right path with your professional (and personal!) goals. A good goal-setting process provides clarity on: Where you're at now Where you want to go...
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How to Define Your Company’s Values and Make Them Stick
Let’s start at the very beginning. (I hear it’s a very good place to start. #musicaljokes) What the heck are values? Values are our standards of behavior, our judgment of what is important in life. If I were to ask you about the things you value most in your personal...
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How to Set Boundaries with Clients
Video Cliffs Notes The Core IssueIn a high-touch, customer-centric business it is essential to cultivate intimate relationships with your customers.When you have a strong personal connection with your clients you:Have a deeper understanding of...
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3 Steps to Better Retention: Reduce Stress, Make More Profits, and Create Satisfying Long Term Relationships
Most businesses are not great at retention. And man… it’s heartbreaking. You work your ass off to get the word out about your business, nervously “putting yourself out there.” You try to be available as often as possible to follow-up immediately on leads. You finally...
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The Salt Shaker Theory: 3 Principles of Effective Management
If you’re looking for insight into successfully managing a team, you’re not going to do much better than famed NYC restaurateur Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group. His book Setting the Table is a must read for anyone interested in learning more about what...
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The 5 Minute Mission Statement
Your company’s mission statement answers the simple question, why do you exist? Having a good answer to that question isn’t trivial. Having a good answer to that question will influence every decision you make about your business. It defines your purpose. Without a...
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The Workplace As A Sharpening Saw of Humanity: The Complete Guide To Creating a Culture of Learning
Read Time: 12-15 Minutes If you’re looking to have a successful (and sustainable!) business, education matters. It matters a lot. Continuous and never-ending improvement is not only the key to making continued improvements in the business, it’s necessary to not...
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Four Apps That Improve My Business and Lower My Stress
The promise of technology is that it helps to improve the quality of our lives, making us more organized, connected, and efficient. But most days I feel like technology makes me less productive. From the daily avalanche of emails to our growing addiction to social...
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Should You Work On Your Strengths or Weaknesses?
One of the great debates in all of personal development and business literature is this: Should you focus your education on shoring up your weaknesses? OR should you ignore your weaknesses and focus on your strengths? In the 70’s and 80’s, personal development gurus...
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3 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service, Starting Today
Here are three things you (and your team) can do today to improve the customer service in your business. They don’t cost any money, they don’t take much time, and you already have all the resources you need to do them. 1. Ask more questions. The more you encourage...
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Getting More Dream Clients By Being More Who You Really Are
When we look at the skillsets that make up “marketing,” we’re actually talking about many distinct creative and technical facilities; copywriting, building out “funnels,” analyzing FB ad performance, creating landing pages, writing value-building content, creating...
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How to Create Boundaries That Help You Achieve Your Goals
Here is a description of what can be a normal week for me. Does this sound familiar to you? On Sunday I sit down to look at my week ahead. It looks busy, but pretty doable. I have some regularly scheduled meetings, some plans I made with friends, and some dedicated...
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Time Management Is About These Two Things
Teaching is a great way to learn. Now that I've finally launched a time management course, something has become very clear in the research, creation, and execution of the course. The good news is time management is really only about two things: 1) Setting Boundaries...
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5 STEPS TO DELEGATE WITH CONFIDENCE
After you watch, please join the conversation in the comments below. How do you like to be asked for help? If someone was going to delegate a task to you, how should they do it? Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
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HOW TO USE TO-DO LISTS WITHOUT BEING SAD/MISERABLE/CRAZY
The To Do List is one of the most tried and true stalwarts of personal productivity. And if poorly implemented, it also has the potential to be the most emotionally destructive. If used well, To Do Lists free up your brain and massively reduce stress while improving...
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10 ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS FOR BUILDING A BUSINESS
It was July 16th, 2011, in the living room of Mark Fisher’s apartment in Astoria, Queens. I took the train from Philadelphia, where I had been living at the time, for our first ever face-to-face meeting about how to grow Mark Fisher Fitness. I showed up with an...
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MF’S 15 BUSINESS PRINCIPLES
In this post, I’m going to give you a run-down of some of my guiding principles in how I approach decision making. When possible, I do my best to attribute, but I’m very confident I have adopted concepts that I’ve read and later forgot. We can assume none of my ideas...
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