Sometimes the breakthroughs that really count are about your leadership style and skillset

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It's often easy to focus on technical innovation, but in my experience, addressing the human aspects (people and processes) is critical for success in implementing any change in technology.

Even more importantly, documenting processes is a great way to help small businesses grow - even if they're not quite to the enterprise CEO level yet.  Once you understand the processes, and can document them, then you're able to start working on your business instead of in your business.

One way to think about out to scale and grow your business and dive, and get into the right mindset is to start thinking about what your business would look like if you were to turn it into a franchise.

The goal (in most cases) isn't really to turn your business into a franchise, but to think through all of the processes and documentation you'd need to have someone else run the business successfully.  Once you can document how to market, manage, and run your business it becomes easier to actually grow and hire people when you're ready.

Differentiation -- at its core -- means to constitute a difference between or specialize in structure or functions to acquire a distinctive and separate character. That sounds intriguing, right?

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I have met with clients and prospects who have resigned themselves to believing that their industry, and by extension themselves, are just a commodity.  They look for silver-bullet tactics to help get ahead, rather than take the time to build a solid strategy built on differentiation.

I believe part of the resistance in spending, what Stephen Covey would call Type II time (the important but non-urgent), is because often those tasks feel like mental exercises great at generating cool slogans, but not so great at delivering immediate results.

Unfortunately this goes back to everyone looking for the easy way to make quick sales. As the saying goes, marketing is really a function of knowing your client so well that your product sell themselves. To do that, one must take the time to really know their clients needs, figure out how to message and produce results in a way that resonates.