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"Love yourself first, and everything else falls in line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world," Lucille Ball. Let's be clear about what she meant. Not the ego kind of love yourself, the narcissism that you are right and others are wrong. It is the self-reflective understanding of who you are and what is important to you without the need for others' approval. Because somewhere along the way we got the definition of success backward. We started m

"One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again" Abraham Maslow. You already know this part, my focus this week is as a reminder. You know the brave choice isn't a one-time thing. You send the follow-up, you go to the event, you ask for the referral, and you know the fear will be back tomorrow asking the same question. Safety or growth? The reason it feels tough is that you want m

"If it were easy then everyone would be doing it, and you would not have an opportunity," Bob Parsons. Read that any morning when you want to quit. The reason referral marketing works is that most people won't do the work. They won't follow up, they won't nurture the relationship after the sale, they will stack excuses instead of actions. That resistance you feel? Everyone feels it, but most people obey it...you don't have to. The hard part is the whole point. If building a r

All week I've laid out the pre-work for Fall event season. Know who you're looking for. Warm them up online before you meet. Walk in with something to offer instead of just a card. All of these are not only free, but practical and effective. You read all of it. So let me ask the real question: Are you actually going to do it? Be honest, because I already know most of us won't. Not because it's hard, but because something always "gets in the way." So instead of another pep ta

On Monday I said the failure at Fall events happens before you walk in the door, and today I want to show you the work that actually prevents it (I mean, I can't leave you hanging with just identifying the problem). There are two parts and neither is complicated; however, both take a little time, which is exactly why most networkers skip them. The first part is knowing who you're actually looking for. Before you can recognize a good connection, you have to know what a good c

You can have the pumpkin spice lattes and the pumpkin patches, Fall is event season if you are an entrepreneur. The school fundraisers start up, the charity galas get scheduled, the community festivals, the chamber mixers, the client appreciation nights. For an entrepreneur trying to grow through relationships, this is the richest stretch of the year for making new connections. And most of us blow it. Here's what usually happens: you see the event on the calendar, you tell y

I actually got much more engagement on Monday than I was expecting; clearly, time is a universal language across all entrepreneurs. What I heard was that you also have plenty of amazing ideas, you also want to chase each one to see if it is the golden goose of business, and you also find that this distracts you from the activities that actually matter, and you feel the effects on your business and frusteration level. Now the real work, not doing it harder, but doing it simpl

I just finished editing a networking video series with a business coach. One of the topics was follow-up and somewhere in the edit, the coach and I landed in the same spot. When her clients can't find time to do something as vital as follow-up, the answer isn't to push harder, it's to simplify. That stuck with me as I am finding myself more and more with this same exact problem, so I want to explore it this week. So I'll be honest, I'm not standing outside this one, I'm guilt

Quick recap for those of you who skipped Monday: my internet went out and my phone hit the driveway on the same morning two weekends ago, and the week that followed ended up being one of my best pipeline weeks in months. Here's exactly what I did, three things, none of them are clever and of course all of them after the panic went away and I regrouped. The thing I remembered quickly is that we used to do a lot of work before any of us had a smartphone, and all three of them m

It happened on the same weekend, an amazing stroke of bad luck. The internet went out last Friday as construction crews tore up our road. Then at my open house the next day, while doing video content, my phone fell from the tripod onto the sidewalk and was smashed. Not a crack, the entire front screen flew off into the yard. So there I was. No internet, no phone, and a full week of work in front of me. I would love to tell you I handled it well, but in another way...I didn't

Monday you counted from memory and most of you got five. Wednesday you went and found the real number and a lot of you came back with forty or fifty, sorted into an A-List and a B-List with a note next to every name. Good. That's more referral work than most people in your industry did all summer, and you did it in three days. Now here's the last score, and I'll tell you up front that almost everybody fails this one including me, for a long time. Look at your list: of all tho

When I ask most people what referral marketing is, and you get some version of the same answer: you finish a job, the customer is happy, you ask if they know anybody else who needs the work. That's the whole definition for a lot of folks. And look, that's not wrong, but it's just the smallest and uncontrollable version of it. It's the version that only works when you're standing in front of somebody who just paid you. Here's the definition I've been using for fifteen years: r

I am not going to sit here and tell you not to aspire to have the Joe Rogan audience, the huge reach, the attention, but what I am preaching is that it should not be the top goal. Your priority should be to use your voice, your podcast, to build up your allies and meet amazing people that will become your referral partners. Let's do the math: a show with a huge audience makes money on advertising or charging guests to get them attention. That means the product is volume, and

Everybody wants attention. Almost nobody is willing to give it. This is essentially how I found myself giving my latest talk, this time for PodMatch community, about using podcasting to build a referral pipeline. And the questions afterward all pointed the same direction. How do I get started? How long does it take? What do I have to give? Good questions. Wrong first question. Here is what I have learned after fifteen years of building a business on referrals instead of ads:

Three seeds to plant this week, since we are in planting season. Monday, I told you that your September is being decided right now. Today I'm going to show you what planting actually looks like, because "build relationships" is useless advice without specifics. After fifteen years of referral marketing, I can tell you the best summer seeds aren't marketing activities at all, they're small human moments that most contractors, insurance agents, and real estate agents walk right

I know you are juggling a lot right now, you are trying to get summer sales, you are busy and the finances this time of year will keep your business strong. But a gentle reminder this week that your September is being decided right now. And I don't say this to stress you out, in fact, just the opposite; we can start doing little bits of planning now that will pay dividends in the Fall...instead of doing nothing now and then hustling hard in the Fall to keep your connections a

We spent this week on simplifying your message and cutting the noise by saying less and being more effective. And as we head into our Friday Call to Action, there is one last reason your content never makes it out of your head and onto the page. It is not writing, it is not even simplifying...It is planning. Most people sit down to create with a blank page and no map or just post at random what they are thinking and feeling that day. Or you tell yourself you need to think of

There is a reason nobody is reading a Charles Dickens novel at the beach. It is July, the sun is out, the kids are loud, having fun, and nobody has the patience for four hundred pages of setup before you get to the point. And yet so many of us write to our audience like we are getting paid by the word or worse, using AI to write mini novel newsletters. Your audience will see all the wording, especially in the time crunch of summer, and keep scrolling or delete your email. Her

I make a pretty solid cheeseburger; it helps that I have one of those grills that has been through all of the flavors, a little grease, a little character, which adds just a touch of flavor. And during the summer, I have been known to be seen flipping burgers on with one hand, dictating a reply email with the other. It happens, summer pulls us in many different directions as we are on a constant search for work - life balance. And I stood there in flip flops trying to be a d

I was never good at networking meetings, being on the introverted side when put into new settings, I rarely got value from meetups and was easily forgotten. However, when I was able to add two skills, it made networking events more effective for me and I actually started making solid connections. The networking lie goes like this: show up, join the group, pay the dues, shake the hands, give out the cards, and the business will come. And as you read this, you know this is not