Mad Hatter Chronicles™

The Startup Funding Addiction: Why More Money Can Make a Weak Business Worse

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:43:06 GMT

I built an eight-figure company starting with $30. No investors. No startup loan. No line of credit. I didn’t even have a credit card. I built it the old-fashioned way: I sold something people wanted, advertised it, generated revenue, reinvested some of that revenue, improved the business, and repeated the process.

That sounds almost quaint now.

Today, entrepreneurs are surrounded by an entire startup economy teaching them that the first step toward making money is apparently spending enormous amounts of money. Get funding. Take out a loan. Hire an agency. Build the brand. Develop the website. Buy the software stack. Order the business cards. Get professional photography. Take the $5,000 course. Build the funnel. Redesign the funnel. Redesign the website you just redesigned.

Eventually, somebody might suggest finding a customer.

We have the order backward.

Spending Money Feels Remarkably Similar to Making Progress

The dangerous assumption is simple:

If I invest more money into my startup, I am building a more serious business.

Sometimes that is true. Often it is psychological camouflage. Buying things feels productive because it creates visible evidence that something is happening. You have a logo. A CRM. A professionally designed website. A stack of beautifully printed collateral sitting on your desk. You look more like a business owner. That is not the same thing as having a business.

This is action bias at work. Doing something relieves the discomfort of uncertainty, even when the action has little connection to the result you actually need. It can also become identity protection. Selling requires you to approach real people and risk hearing no. Advertising exposes your offer to the marketplace. Launching creates the terrifying possibility that customers will shrug. Tweaking your website for the 14th time is considerably safer. You can remain very busy without ever allowing the market to render a verdict.

Then the Vampires Arrive

The startup world is filled with people perfectly willing to help you spend your money. Marketing agencies can be particularly dangerous here because their incentives are rarely neutral. If an agency sells branding, amazingly enough, you need branding. If it sells SEO, SEO becomes the missing piece. If it sells social media management, suddenly your Instagram strategy is an emergency.

The vampire problem is not that every agency is incompetent or dishonest. It is that sellers naturally see your business through the lens of what they sell. That is incentive bias .

Then false authority enters the room. The entrepreneur assumes the person with the polished presentation, huge social following, podcast, course, agency, certification, or impressive vocabulary must understand how to build the business. Maybe. But selling marketing services and building successful businesses are not the same skill.

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars receiving very professional assistance solving the wrong problem.

What a Startup Actually Needs

Strip away the startup theater and the question becomes much simpler:

Can this business create enough value that customers will exchange money for it?

That is the beginning. You need an offer. You need a way to reach potential customers. You need a way to convert some of them. Then you need enough margin and operational competence to deliver what you promised.

A website can help.

Advertising can help.

Branding can help.

Technology can help.

Capital can absolutely help—and some businesses genuinely require significant startup capital because of inventory, equipment, manufacturing, real estate, regulatory requirements, research, staffing, or other unavoidable costs.

But money does not repair a business model that nobody wants. It merely allows you to operate the wrong model longer. That is why excessive startup funding can sometimes be dangerous. Money delays consequences. Instead of forcing the entrepreneur to discover what works, abundant capital can finance months or years of elaborate activity around something that never developed economic traction.

Revenue Before Decoration

Startups should be agile because early-stage businesses are still learning. Your pricing may change. Your customers may surprise you. Your offer may evolve. Your positioning may be wrong. What you thought customers valued may turn out to be completely different from what actually makes them buy.

Why spend $15,000 perfecting something you may need to change three months from now?

Build what you need now.
Get it in front of customers.
Generate revenue.
Learn.
Then improve it.

That was essentially how I built my first major company. Revenue funded growth. Growth produced information. Information improved the business. The improved business generated more revenue. It was not glamorous. It worked. Then later... it became very glamorous!

The Rewire: Fund What Works

The stronger mental model is not never borrow money and certainly not never spend money .

It is:

Stop financing assumptions. Start funding evidence.

Instead of asking, “What should my startup buy?” ask, “What does the business need to prove next?”

Maybe you need a simple website.

Maybe you need $1,000 in advertising.

Maybe you need a better offer.

Maybe you need to personally make 100 sales calls and discover that your supposedly brilliant value proposition makes absolutely no sense to customers.

Good. That information may be worth considerably more than another $5,000 course. Once something begins working, invest more aggressively in making it better.

Revenue before decoration.

Validation before expansion.

Diagnosis before prescription.

Evidence before debt.

Build a Business, Not the Costume of One

This is one of the reasons we work differently with startups inside Lemonade Maker® Strategies. We do not sell marketing services. We help you determine what your business actually needs now . Then we roll up our sleeves and work with you to execute the moves most likely to create real economic progress: developing the business model, strengthening the offer, reaching customers, selling, advertising, learning from the response, and improving from there.

You can make everything prettier later. First, make it work.

The Gambit

Before spending another dollar on your startup, ask yourself one uncomfortable question:

If I were forbidden from buying anything else for the next 30 days, what would I have to do to make a customer give me money?

Do that first.

FAQ

Do you need funding to start a business?

Not always. Some businesses require substantial capital because of equipment, inventory, facilities, staffing, or regulatory costs. Many service and knowledge businesses can begin much more leanly by validating demand, generating sales, and reinvesting revenue.

Should a startup spend heavily on branding and a website?

Usually not before the business has validated its offer and customer demand. Early startups are still learning, which means expensive branding and website work may need to be changed once the market reveals what actually works.

When does startup funding make sense?

Funding becomes much more compelling when capital is solving a clearly understood constraint or accelerating something that has already demonstrated economic potential. Borrowing money simply to finance experimentation, appearance, or unproven assumptions carries considerably more risk.

Endless Business Podcasts: Why Generic Advice Can Hurt Your Business

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:27:32 GMT

There has never been more business advice available. Open Spotify, YouTube, LinkedIn, or Apple Podcasts and you can spend your entire working day listening to people explain how to grow a company. There are podcasts about marketing, sales, leadership, branding, productivity, hiring, AI, entrepreneurship, scaling, funnels, content, mindset, and probably seventeen different ways to optimize your morning routine before breakfast.

Some of it is good. That may actually be part of the problem. Because the dangerous assumption isn't that all these people are idiots. It is that good advice must therefore be good advice for you. It isn't.

Anyone Can Buy a Microphone

The barrier to becoming a business commentator has essentially disappeared. You need a microphone, a camera, something to say, and enough confidence to say it convincingly. Credentials are optional. Experience is helpful but hardly required. And once someone develops an audience, something subtle happens: visibility begins to look like authority.

We start assuming the person who talks about business must understand business. Maybe they do. But they don't understand your business. They haven't examined your margins. They don't know your competitive position. They haven't seen your customer acquisition costs, your conversion problems, your retention numbers, your pricing, your offer, your team, your market, your cash position, or the strange little operational problem quietly eating your company alive.

Yet five minutes into the episode, they already have the answer.

Post more content.

Build your personal brand.

Hire a setter.

Start a newsletter.

Raise your prices.

Run Facebook ads.

Launch a funnel.

Use AI.

Create a community.

And because you've heard the same advice from fourteen other podcasts, eventually it starts sounding less like an opinion and more like a law of business. Repetition has become evidence.

Why Recycled Advice Feels So Useful

Most podcast advice has to be generic. It has no choice. A host speaking to 50,000 listeners cannot diagnose 50,000 businesses. The advice has to be broad enough that thousands of people can recognize themselves in it. That makes it excellent content. It does not necessarily make it excellent strategy.

Consider the entrepreneur whose sales are falling. One podcast says she needs more leads. Another says she needs better social media. Another recommends improving her sales process. Another tells her to increase her ad budget. Every suggestion could be legitimate, but perhaps none of them addresses the actual problem.

Maybe customers don't understand the offer.

Maybe the offer isn't compelling.

Maybe the market has changed.

Maybe the price is wrong.

Maybe the company has plenty of leads but terrible conversion.

Maybe the underlying business model was never particularly strong.

More marketing poured onto a weak business doesn't solve the weakness. Sometimes it simply advertises it faster.

That is where generic advice becomes dangerous.

Advice Is Not Diagnosis

This distinction gets lost constantly in entrepreneurship. Information tells you what can be done. Strategy determines what should be done here. Those are completely different things.

A podcast can teach you how email marketing works. A YouTube video can explain Google Ads. A business book can teach a useful pricing framework. AI can generate twenty marketing ideas in seconds. All of those tools can be valuable.

But none of those ideas becomes a strategy until someone answers a much harder question:

Given this particular business, at this particular moment, with these particular constraints, what should we actually do?

That requires diagnosis. And diagnosis is uncomfortable because sometimes the answer isn't the fashionable tactic you wanted to try.

Sometimes you don't need a better funnel.

You need a better offer.

Sometimes you don't need more traffic.

You need better positioning.

Sometimes you shouldn't scale.

You should fix the economics first.

Sometimes the smartest marketing decision is to stop spending money on marketing until you understand why the people already arriving aren't buying.

The right strategy cannot be separated from the situation producing the problem.

The Rewire: Stop Collecting Advice. Start Solving Constraints.

Entrepreneurs have become extraordinarily good at collecting information. We listen to podcasts at the gym. We save LinkedIn posts. We subscribe to newsletters. We buy books. We watch webinars. We ask AI. We accumulate tactics until our brains resemble storage units filled with strategies we might someday use.

The stronger mental model is different:

Don't ask, “Is this good advice?”

Ask:

“Is this the right solution to the problem my business actually has?”

That question changes everything. It turns business strategy from content consumption into diagnosis and that is an important difference behind Lemonade Maker® Strategies . We aren't trying to create another library of inspirational business lectures for you to consume. The purpose is to take real business problems, teach useful strategic frameworks, and then help entrepreneurs apply those ideas to the businesses they are actually building. Expert instruction matters. But so does interpretation, discussion, adaptation, and implementation. Because knowledge becomes valuable when it survives contact with your actual company.

A marketing agency often sees a marketing problem.

A sales consultant often sees a sales problem.

A podcast host sees whatever today's episode happens to be about.

But your business doesn't care what anyone is selling this week.

It has its own constraints.

Our job is to help you find them.

The Gambit

The next time a podcast, guru, book, consultant, or AI gives you a brilliant business idea, don't immediately ask:

“How do I implement this?”

Ask something first:

“What evidence do I have that this solves the problem I actually have?”

If you cannot answer that question, you probably don't have a strategy yet. You have another piece of advice. There is already an endless supply of those. What entrepreneurs need far more desperately is someone willing to help them determine what applies, what doesn't, what matters now, and how to actually build it. That's the difference between preaching business and helping someone create one. At Lemonade Maker®, we help you build.

The $5,000 Course Trap: When Expensive Business Education Becomes the Wrong Prescription

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:19:48 GMT

You are struggling with your business. Revenue is flat. Marketing isn't producing what you expected. You know something needs to change, but you aren't entirely sure what.

Then the ad appears.

Someone has the system. The framework. The blueprint. The funnel. The method that supposedly took them from struggling entrepreneur to seven-figure authority. There is a webinar, a handful of impressive testimonials, maybe a countdown timer, and eventually the offer: $4,997.

Suddenly the problem feels much clearer. Apparently, this is what you've been missing. Maybe.

But there is another possibility worth considering before reaching for your credit card:

What if they just sold you the only solution they had?

The Most Important Question Was Never Asked

The dangerous assumption behind many high-ticket business courses is simple:

If this person has a successful strategy, learning that strategy will improve my business.

That sounds perfectly reasonable. Sometimes it is true. But notice what is missing: diagnosis.

Imagine an entrepreneur whose company isn't growing. She buys a $5,000 course on Facebook advertising because the person selling it convincingly demonstrates how advertising transformed his business. The problem is that her advertising may already be fine. Her real problem could be weak positioning, poor margins, an unremarkable offer, bad pricing, weak sales conversion, low customer retention, operational capacity, or a business model that simply doesn't create enough value.

She just spent $5,000 solving the wrong problem. That is the business equivalent of walking into a doctor's office, having someone hand you an expensive bottle of pills, and discovering afterward that nobody bothered to determine what was wrong with you.

When the Hammer Diagnoses Everything as a Nail

There is a psychological phenomenon sometimes called Maslow's Hammer : when you become highly skilled with one tool, you begin seeing problems that can be solved with that tool. Course businesses have an additional problem: financial incentive.

If someone sells a course about funnels, funnels have a remarkable tendency to become the solution.

If someone sells a course about personal branding, suddenly your problem is personal branding.

If someone teaches LinkedIn prospecting, perhaps what your company has been missing all these years is LinkedIn prospecting.

That doesn't mean the instructor is dishonest. Their strategy may genuinely work. But their business model creates an obvious bias: they make money when your diagnosis leads to their product.

The Federal Trade Commission has repeatedly warned consumers about business coaching and money-making programs that promise “proven systems,” substantial income, or business success in exchange for significant upfront payments. In some enforcement cases, programs costing thousands of dollars allegedly produced little or no income for most purchasers while continuing to sell additional services and upgrades.

Not every expensive course is a scam. But price does not remove incentive bias.

Course Creator Does Not Mean Business Expert

This is another distinction entrepreneurs frequently miss. Someone can be extraordinarily good at building an audience, running webinars, creating content, buying ads, and selling a $5,000 information product. That proves something. It proves they are good at selling their information product. It does not automatically establish expertise in business-model design, pricing, finance, competitive positioning, organizational structure, customer retention, operations, leadership, technology, innovation, or diagnosing another entrepreneur's company.

This is false authority . We see someone displaying mastery in one visible domain and unconsciously extend that authority into domains where it may not belong. The irony is that excellent marketing can make this distortion stronger. The better someone is at selling expertise, the more expertise we assume they possess. Those are not necessarily the same skill.

Then You Actually Have to Finish the Thing

There is another inconvenient problem with buying information: buying it and using it are two entirely different behaviors. Research on massive open online courses has repeatedly found substantial learner dropout, although completion varies enormously depending on the course, learner intention, format, cost, and support. One analysis of 221 MOOCs found completion rates ranging from less than 1% to more than 50%, with a median of 12.6%. That research should not be treated as the completion rate for expensive business courses—the populations are very different—but it illustrates the larger point: access to information does not guarantee implementation.

Entrepreneurs already have businesses to run. So the $5,000 course joins the other courses, books, podcasts, webinars, saved videos, unfinished certifications, downloaded PDFs, and brilliant strategies sitting in a folder somewhere. The purchase created movement. The business didn't necessarily move. That is tactic addiction : repeatedly acquiring another method because acquiring a method feels easier than determining what the business actually needs.

Information Is Not Strategy

Strip away the marketing and something much simpler remains. A course can be excellent. A $5,000 course can even be worth considerably more than $5,000.

But its value depends on three questions:

Does this solve the problem I actually have?
Can I realistically implement it?
Will solving this problem materially improve the economics of my business?

Those questions should come before the purchase. That changes the mental model.

The old wiring is:

Problem → Find an expert → Buy their solution.

The stronger wiring is:

Problem → Diagnose the constraint → Determine the appropriate solution → Choose the right expertise → Implement → Measure.

Diagnosis comes before prescription.

Always.

Why the Upfront Bet Matters

There is nothing inherently wrong with charging upfront for education. Universities do it. Professional training companies do it. Excellent instructors do it. But recognize what happens economically. Once you have paid $5,000, the seller has largely achieved their desired outcome. You haven't.

If you discover two weeks later that the program was wrong for your business, too generic, impossible to implement, or nowhere near as transformative as the webinar suggested, most of the financial risk sits with you. For a cash-strapped entrepreneur, that matters. Five thousand dollars isn't imaginary money. It may represent advertising, technology, inventory, payroll, product development, customer research, testing, or months of strategic runway. Capital spent chasing the wrong answer cannot be spent solving the right problem.

A Different Relationship With Business Advice

This is one reason Lemonade Maker® Strategies is deliberately built differently. The objective isn't to convince every entrepreneur that the same giant course contains the answer. It is to determine what is actually happening inside the business and then apply the strategy appropriate to that situation. Fast-moving. High-impact. Tech-forward. Applied to the problem in front of you rather than buried inside forty hours of prerecorded lessons.

And instead of requiring entrepreneurs to make one enormous bet on the relationship, Lemonade Maker® Strategies has to continue earning the membership month after month. That changes the incentive. The goal isn't to sell you a hammer. The goal is to figure out whether you even have a nail.

The Gambit

Before buying your next $5,000 business course, ask the seller—or yourself—one uncomfortable question:

What evidence do I have that this is the problem my business actually needs to solve?

If you cannot answer that yet, don't buy the prescription. Get the diagnosis.

FAQ

Are $5,000 business courses usually worth the money?
Usually, no. Many high-ticket business courses package fairly ordinary marketing tactics, frameworks, or information behind aggressive sales funnels and inflated pricing. The entrepreneur assumes the price reflects the value of the knowledge, when often it reflects how effectively the course creator learned to sell the course.

What should I ask before buying an expensive business course?
Don’t just ask whether the information might be useful. Ask: Can I get this knowledge, better strategic guidance, and help actually implementing it for less money? Information has become incredibly abundant. What is scarce is accurate diagnosis, judgment, customization, execution, and someone capable of helping you apply the right strategy to your particular business.

Why is Lemonade Maker® Strategies different from a high-ticket business course?
Lemonade Maker® Strategies is not built around convincing every entrepreneur to buy the same predetermined solution. We help diagnose what your business actually needs, develop strategies around the situation in front of you, and help you implement them. Instead of paying thousands upfront for a library of videos and hoping you chose the right answer, members receive ongoing, fast-paced, high-impact, tech-forward strategic support that has to keep earning its value every month.

Does Talking to Yourself Out Loud Mean You’re Crazy?

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:26:47 GMT

My wife occasionally catches me having conversations with myself. Not little mutterings like, “Where did I put my keys?” I mean actual conversations. I may be pacing around the room explaining a business strategy, arguing both sides of a problem, rehearsing something I intend to say, or working through an idea as though an invisible board of directors has assembled in my office.

Elizabeth finds this somewhat alarming. She has, with varying degrees of seriousness, wondered whether I might be schizophrenic. I prefer another explanation: I run Lemonade Maker® Strategies, and the intellectual and creative output around here occasionally exceeds normal human cognitive operating specifications.

That is not a scientifically recognized diagnosis. The talking to yourself part, however, is real—and considerably more normal than people sometimes assume.

The Strange Assumption About Self-Talk

There is a cultural caricature attached to talking to yourself. We associate it with the disheveled person on the street arguing with someone who isn't there. So when someone carries on an audible conversation alone, our brains make a quick association:

Talking to yourself = losing touch with reality.

But that skips an enormously important distinction. Talking aloud while knowing perfectly well that you are talking to yourself is not the same thing as responding to a voice or person you perceive as coming from somewhere else. Cleveland Clinic makes essentially this distinction: ordinary audible self-talk can be perfectly normal; concern becomes more appropriate when someone believes they are responding to an external source or hallucination. In other words, the interesting question isn't whether you're talking. It's what your brain is doing with the conversation.

Sometimes Your Brain Needs to Hear It

Researchers use terms such as self-talk, inner speech, and private speech to describe different versions of something human beings do constantly: use language to interact with their own thinking. A 2023 review of self-talk research identified functions including thinking, problem solving, self-regulation, self-reflection, working memory, rehearsal, emotional expression, and replay.

That begins to explain why I sometimes find myself talking through complicated business problems. Thoughts inside your head don't necessarily arrive neatly arranged. They overlap. One idea interrupts another. Assumptions hide inside conclusions. You jump from A to D without noticing that B and C never actually made sense. Speaking forces thought through a narrower channel. You have to put one sentence after another. And that can expose things.

1. Sequencing complicated reasoning

Suppose I'm developing a strategy involving pricing, positioning, customer behavior, competitive differentiation and marketing.

Inside my head, I can hold pieces of all five simultaneously. But explaining the strategy aloud forces me to establish relationships:

If this is true, then this follows. But if that happens, this assumption no longer works…

The conversation becomes a kind of cognitive workbench. There is experimental evidence that verbal thinking can contribute to planning and executive functioning. In one study, deliberately interfering with participants' inner speech impaired their performance on a multifactor planning task.

2. Rehearsing an important conversation

You've probably done this one without considering yourself remotely crazy. You have an important meeting tomorrow.

So you imagine:

They're probably going to object to the price.

Then you answer the imaginary objection.

Then you realize your answer isn't particularly convincing.

So you try another.

Self-talk becomes rehearsal. You're stress-testing language before the real conversation happens. Recent everyday-life research has even found that people use self-talk when preparing what to say or do.

3. Finding the solution by “telling” someone else

This explains a peculiar experience entrepreneurs have all the time. You bring someone a difficult problem. You spend ten minutes explaining it. The other person says almost nothing.

And suddenly you announce:

“Oh. I know what I need to do.”

They look at you as though they'd like consulting fees. But explaining the problem forced you to organize it differently. You heard your own assumptions. You supplied missing context. You converted something fuzzy into language. Sometimes the person across the table didn't solve your problem. They provided an audience while you made your thinking visible to yourself.

4. Focus and memory

Language can even influence attention. Researchers Gary Lupyan and Daniel Swingley found that saying the name of an object aloud could help people locate it during a visual-search task under the right conditions. So the person wandering around saying, “Keys… keys… keys…” may actually be onto something. Perhaps civilization owes absent-minded self-talk an apology.

5. Emotional processing

Not all problems are strategic. Sometimes we're trying to understand what happened, why something bothered us, what we believe about it, or what we want to do next. Language can give shape to emotional experience. Self-talk research includes self-reflection, emotional expression, replay and self-regulation among its functions. Talking something through doesn't guarantee that your conclusion will be correct. You can rehearse a distortion just as easily as you can expose one. But putting thoughts into words gives you something concrete to examine.

The Mad Hatter Distortion

And that is where this belongs in Mad Hatter Chronicles. The distortion isn't necessarily happening inside the person talking to himself. It may be happening inside the observer. We see an unfamiliar behavior and assign a familiar explanation to it.

He talks to himself. That's strange. Strange behavior indicates something is wrong. But behavior without context is lousy evidence.

The same outward behavior can represent very different internal processes. One person pacing around an office talking aloud might be confused. Another might be rehearsing tomorrow's presentation. Another might be regulating emotion. Another might be building a business model. The visible behavior doesn't tell you which. That's the larger entrepreneurial lesson.

Strange Isn't the Same as Wrong

Entrepreneurs, creators and strategists frequently develop unusual working habits because their work requires them to manipulate ideas that don't yet exist in finished form. We sketch on whiteboards. Pace rooms. Cover walls with Post-it notes. Build ridiculous spreadsheets. Explain ideas to people who have absolutely no idea why we're telling them any of this. And, apparently, some of us hold staff meetings with ourselves.

The mistake is judging the appearance of a thinking process instead of evaluating its output.

That gives us a much better mental model:

Old wiring:
Unusual behavior → Something must be wrong.

Rewire:
Unusual behavior → Understand its function → Evaluate whether it produces useful thinking.

There is one important qualification. Talking aloud isn't automatically superior thinking. Research has also found situations in which verbalizing thoughts can interfere with performance, particularly when the task depends on forms of reasoning that don't translate neatly into words. Which makes the reality more interesting than either extreme. Talking to yourself isn't proof that you're crazy. It isn't proof that you're brilliant, either. It's a cognitive tool. And like most tools, what matters is what you're doing with it.

The Gambit

The next time you're stuck on a complicated problem, close the door. Then explain the problem out loud as though you're explaining it to someone intelligent who knows absolutely nothing about it. State what you know. State what you're assuming. Argue the other side. Explain why your proposed solution should work. Then listen to yourself. You may discover that the person you needed to talk to was already in the room. Just try not to let your spouse walk in halfway through. Apparently, that requires a much longer explanation.

FAQ

Is it normal to talk to yourself out loud?
Yes. Audible self-talk can be a normal way of thinking, rehearsing, focusing, problem solving, or processing emotions. The important distinction is whether you recognize the speech as your own self-directed thinking.

Why does talking out loud help me solve problems?
Putting thoughts into language can force you to sequence ideas, articulate assumptions and make relationships between ideas more explicit. Research on inner speech also suggests verbal thinking can play a role in planning and executive functioning.

Does talking to yourself mean you have schizophrenia?
Not by itself. Ordinary self-talk is different from experiencing speech as coming from an external source or responding to hallucinations. If someone experiences voices as external or has difficulty distinguishing them from reality, that's a different phenomenon and warrants professional evaluation.

And I particularly like the final joke. It brings Elizabeth back into the story and lets the piece end with personality instead of turning into a psychology textbook.

When the Boss Becomes the Villain: Understanding DARVO in Business

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:04:26 GMT

When your company has five employees, most conflict is relatively easy to see. Somebody made a mistake. Somebody missed a deadline. Somebody failed to follow a procedure. You can usually sit down, talk about what happened, and work through it. As the company gets bigger, something changes.

I began noticing it when my staff grew beyond roughly ten or fifteen people. Once I started franchising, I encountered it far more often. Problems were no longer always about what someone did. Sometimes the discussion itself changed shape. An employee or franchisee would be confronted with a legitimate performance problem, and suddenly I was defending my character, my motives, my leadership, or the company itself.

There is a psychological pattern entrepreneurs should understand because, once you recognize it, certain business conflicts begin to look very different. It is called DARVO .

What Is DARVO?

DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender . Psychologist Jennifer Freyd developed the term to describe a response that can occur when someone is confronted about wrongdoing. The person denies or minimizes what happened, attacks the credibility or motives of the person confronting them, and then reverses the roles so that the person originally being questioned becomes the victim.

DARVO research originated largely in the study of interpersonal abuse and misconduct, so we should be careful about casually labeling every workplace disagreement as DARVO. But the underlying pattern of denial, attack, and blame reversal can appear in organizational conflicts as well. Freyd's institutional research specifically notes that retaliation against whistleblowers can follow a DARVO pattern.

And entrepreneurs need to understand why that matters. Imagine a franchisee whose location is struggling. The system requires a particular advertising budget, but the franchisee consistently spends less. Certain sales procedures are supposed to be followed, but they have gradually abandoned them. Training recommendations are ignored. Required systems are used inconsistently.

Eventually the franchisor confronts the problem. Instead of discussing those decisions, the conversation begins moving somewhere else.

The system doesn't work.

Corporate doesn't support us.

The founder doesn't understand our market.

They're targeting me because I challenged them.

They're trying to destroy my business.

The original question was: Are you following the system?

The new question becomes: Why is the franchisor abusing this poor franchisee?

That shift can change everything.

Why DARVO Is So Dangerous Inside a Company

The mistake entrepreneurs make is assuming facts will automatically win. I believed some version of this myself. If the contracts were clear, the procedures were documented, the emails existed, and the sequence of events could be demonstrated, surely reasonable people would eventually understand what happened.

Not necessarily.

DARVO works partly because human beings respond to stories, alliances, emotion, perceived power differences, and claims of victimization. Experimental research has found that observers exposed to DARVO can perceive the person using it as less responsible and the person confronting them as less believable.

Now put that dynamic inside a company.

An employer automatically has power in the eyes of employees. A franchisor appears more powerful than an individual franchisee. The founder has the title, the company, the lawyers, the systems, and the authority. That makes the role reversal remarkably easy to communicate.

The employee becomes David.

The company becomes Goliath.

And suddenly a dispute about someone's behavior becomes a referendum on yours. This is where projection, blame shifting, group politics, gossip, and reputation attacks can begin feeding one another. One disgruntled person finds another. Individual complaints become a shared narrative. The emotional intensity of the story begins functioning as evidence for the story. That can become extraordinarily destructive.

But Be Careful: Not Every Critic Is Using DARVO

There is an equally dangerous trap waiting for the entrepreneur. Once you learn about DARVO, you can start seeing it everywhere.

An employee complains? DARVO.

A franchisee says the system isn't working? DARVO.

Someone says your leadership contributed to the problem? DARVO.

That would simply replace one distortion with another.

Sometimes the employee is right.

Sometimes management handled something badly. Sometimes the franchise system genuinely has weaknesses. Sometimes corporate support was inadequate. Sometimes the founder really did become defensive, unfair, inconsistent, or controlling.

So the useful question is not:

Who is claiming to be the victim?

It is:

What actually happened?

Strip away titles. Strip away outrage. Strip away accusations. Strip away whoever has the most allies.

Go back to the evidence.

What was expected? What happened? What was communicated? What did each party actually do? Which claims can be demonstrated? Which claims are interpretation? And, most importantly, has the conversation moved away from the original issue and toward destroying the credibility of the person who raised it?

That is the difference between using DARVO as a tool for clearer perception and using it as another convenient label.

The Rewire: Accountability Before Narrative

Entrepreneurs need a stronger mental model as their companies become more complicated.

The old wiring is:

There is a conflict → determine whose story sounds more convincing.

The better wiring is:

There is a conflict → establish the sequence of events → separate behavior from interpretation → determine responsibility → then evaluate the competing narratives.

That matters because accusations are not evidence. But neither is authority. The CEO is not automatically right because she is the CEO. The employee is not automatically right because he feels mistreated. The franchisee is not automatically right because his business is failing. And the franchisor is not automatically right because the operating manual says otherwise.

Reality gets the deciding vote. That principle becomes increasingly important as your organization grows because you are no longer managing only operations. You are managing competing perceptions of reality. And sometimes the most dangerous business problem isn't the original mistake. It's what happens when someone desperately needs that mistake to become your fault.

The Gambit

The next time a serious conflict erupts inside your company, resist the urge to immediately defend yourself. Write down the original issue in one sentence. Then watch what happens to the conversation. If you started by asking why a procedure wasn't followed and twenty minutes later you're defending whether you're a good person, pay attention. Something important just moved. And your job as an entrepreneur is to move the conversation back to reality.

FAQ

Is every defensive employee or franchisee using DARVO?

No. People naturally become defensive when criticized, and legitimate complaints against leadership should be taken seriously. DARVO is useful when it describes a broader pattern of denial, personal attack, and reversal of responsibility—not simply disagreement or anger.

Why is DARVO particularly dangerous for entrepreneurs?

Because founders and employers can become convenient targets for blame, especially when employees, partners, or franchisees are experiencing poor results. Once the dispute becomes social, reputational, or political, the original evidence can easily become buried beneath competing narratives.

What should a business owner do when they suspect DARVO?

Do not fight narrative with narrative. Return to documented behavior, timelines, expectations, agreements, decisions, and evidence. The goal isn't to prove that you're the victim. The goal is to determine what actually happened.

If you're dealing with a business situation where personalities, politics, blame, and performance problems have become tangled together, that is exactly the kind of problem worth examining through a CEO Diagnostic . Before deciding what to do, we separate the operational problem from the story surrounding it. Because leadership gets considerably easier once you know which problem you're actually solving.

The Endless Startup: Why Some Entrepreneurs Never Actually Launch

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:09:02 GMT

There is a strangely comfortable phase of entrepreneurship where almost anything is still possible. You can redesign the website. Change the logo. Rewrite the offer. Take another course. Research another platform. Add another service. Reconsider your niche. Build another funnel. Watch another expert explain the tactic that supposedly changes everything.

And through all of it, you can continue telling yourself:

I’m building my business.

Sometimes you are.

But sometimes you are hiding from the part where the business actually begins. Because eventually, entrepreneurship requires something considerably less comfortable than building. You have to put the business in front of strangers and find out whether they want it.

The Business Before Reality Arrives

The assumption sounds perfectly reasonable:

I just need to get a few more things right before I launch.

There is nothing inherently wrong with preparation. A poorly designed offer should be improved. A confusing business model should be clarified. Important systems should exist before customers arrive. The problem begins when preparation has no finish line. There is always another improvement available. Another technology. Another marketing tactic. Another certification. Another expert with a different opinion.

That creates an entrepreneurial version of hope preservation. Before launching, your business can still become enormously successful. Nobody has rejected the offer yet. Advertising hasn’t failed. Prospects haven’t ignored your emails. Customers haven’t told you the price is too high. The market hasn’t exposed weaknesses in the business model. Everything remains possible because very little has actually been tested. And that can feel wonderful.

Why Building Feels Safer Than Launching

Launching introduces something entrepreneurs cannot completely control: reality . You may spend $1,000 on advertising and discover that hardly anyone responds. You may have twenty sales conversations and hear “no” nineteen times. You may learn that customers like your idea but will not pay enough for it. Or perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility of all: you may discover that the business model you have spent months building simply does not work in its current form. So the mind finds productive-looking alternatives.

Learn more.

Build more.

Change the website.

Try organic social media.

Start a podcast.

Rewrite the business plan.

Switch tactics.

Change niches.

Rebrand.

None of these things are necessarily bad. The distortion occurs when they become substitutes for exposure to the market. You remain incredibly busy while carefully avoiding the one experiment capable of telling you whether the business works.

What Launching Actually Looks Like

Strip away the startup mythology and launching is much less glamorous than people imagine. For most small businesses, you need three basic things.

First, you need a clear business model . You should understand who pays you, what they are buying, roughly what it costs you to deliver it, and how the economics can eventually support a real business. Second, you need a compelling offer . Not merely a product or service, but a reason someone should care enough to exchange money for it. Then you need customers. That means putting the offer in front of enough qualified people to learn something.

For many businesses, I recommend entrepreneurs plan for roughly $1,000 per month in actual advertising spend as a practical starting budget for testing and customer acquisition . That is not a universal law, and some businesses can launch through partnerships, direct outreach, referrals, local networking, marketplaces, or an existing audience. But entrepreneurs should not build a plan that assumes customers will somehow materialize for free. And that advertising budget is the media spend itself. It does not include whatever you might pay an agency, consultant, designer, copywriter, or marketing company.

This is where the startup leaves imagination and enters economics.

Traffic comes in.

People respond—or they don’t.

Sales conversations happen.

Some prospects buy.

Others reject you.

Patterns begin appearing.

And now you finally have something more useful than optimism.

You have evidence.

Stop Treating Rejection as a Verdict

This is where many entrepreneurs lose confidence unnecessarily. A failed advertisement does not prove the company is doomed. Ten people saying no does not prove nobody will ever buy. Even a weak initial launch does not automatically mean the underlying idea is bad. It means something needs to be understood.

Maybe the offer is weak.

Maybe the positioning is wrong.

Maybe the customer is wrong.

Maybe the price is wrong.

Maybe the advertising is poor.

Maybe the sales process is failing.

And yes, sometimes the business model itself needs to change. That is not entrepreneurship going wrong. That is entrepreneurship finally happening. The market is giving you information that another six months of planning never could.

The Rewire: Build to Learn, Then Enter the Market

The stronger mental model is not:

Build until I feel confident enough to launch.

Confidence may never arrive.

The better model is:

Build enough to create a credible business hypothesis. Launch it. Learn from reality. Improve from evidence.

That changes the purpose of launching. You are not walking onto a stage where the market delivers a final judgment on whether you are a successful entrepreneur. You are beginning the feedback loop that allows the business to evolve. Great entrepreneurs are not people whose first assumptions are always correct. They are people who become unusually good at discovering when they are wrong—and changing faster than everyone else.

The Gambit

Look at what you are working on this week. Then ask yourself one uncomfortable question:

Is this bringing my business closer to the market—or giving me another reason not to face it?

If you have been building for months but still do not have a clear model, a compelling offer, a customer acquisition plan, and meaningful conversations with actual prospects, you may not have a startup problem. You may have a fear problem disguised as productivity. That is exactly the kind of barrier we work through inside Lemonade Maker® .

Sometimes entrepreneurs do not need another tactic. They need someone who can help them see what is actually holding the business back, strengthen what needs strengthening, and develop enough clarity and confidence to finally make the move. Because eventually, the business has to leave your head. The market has to get a vote. And that is where entrepreneurship really begins.

FAQ

How do I know when my business is ready to launch?
You do not need everything perfected. You need a reasonably clear business model, a compelling offer, a defined customer, and a realistic way to put that offer in front of enough people to test whether they will buy.

How much money should a startup spend on advertising?
There is no universal amount, but for many small businesses, roughly $1,000 per month in actual advertising spend can provide a practical starting point for testing customer acquisition. Some business models require considerably more, while others can initially rely on direct outreach, partnerships, referrals, or an existing audience.

What if I launch my business and nobody buys?
Treat the result as information rather than a verdict. Examine the offer, positioning, audience, pricing, marketing, sales process, and business model. Launching gives you evidence that continued preparation cannot.

Should You Franchise Your Business? How to Know If Your Business Is Actually Franchiseable

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:31:50 GMT

Franchising can be one of the most powerful ways to expand a successful business. Instead of financing every new location yourself, hiring every manager, signing every lease, and carrying all the risk of national expansion, you create a system other people invest their own capital to operate. That sounds incredibly attractive. Sometimes it is. But there is an important distinction entrepreneurs often miss: being able to structure something as a franchise does not mean you have built something worth franchising.

What Actually Makes a Franchise?

From the federal regulatory standpoint, the FTC generally looks for three elements in determining whether a commercial relationship falls within its Franchise Rule: the franchisee operates under or in association with the franchisor’s trademark; the franchisor exercises significant control over, or provides significant assistance to, the franchisee’s method of operation; and the franchisee is required to pay at least $500 during the first six months of operation.

Importantly, calling something a “license,” “dealer program,” or another name does not necessarily prevent it from being a franchise. The FTC looks at the substance of the relationship, not simply what you call it. But those are regulatory criteria. They are not a test of whether your concept will make a good franchise. A viable franchise needs something much harder to build: a profitable business that can be taught, transferred, supported, replicated, and operated successfully by someone other than you.

Why Franchise Instead of Opening More Locations Yourself?

Suppose you have three successful locations and want 30. You could finance 27 more stores yourself. That means leases, construction, equipment, payroll, management, working capital and enormous operational complexity. Every new location increases both your investment and your exposure.

Franchising changes the capital structure of expansion. The franchisee generally supplies the capital required to establish and operate the local business while receiving the right to operate your brand and system within the terms of the franchise agreement. That makes the franchisee different from a conventional store manager.

A franchisee owns their local business, but they are buying into someone else’s entrepreneurial creation. They are not being hired to reinvent your brand, redesign the business model or develop their own operating system. In a well-designed franchise, much of that uncertainty has deliberately been removed. For some people, that is precisely the attraction.

What Kind of Franchisee Does Your Model Need?

This is one of the questions I would answer before designing the franchise offering. Some concepts can support an owner with one location. Others make considerably more sense as multi-unit businesses. A sophisticated operator may eventually own a portfolio of locations and concentrate on opening stores, developing managers and operating them efficiently rather than personally delivering the service.

At the other end is the owner-operator franchise. Think of certain home-service concepts where the franchisee may initially be deeply involved in delivering the actual service. They may buy a franchise because they want a brand, operating structure, training and support rather than starting alone.

Those are very different franchisees. If the economics become compelling only after three locations, design with multi-unit ownership in mind. A development agreement can give an operator rights to develop multiple units according to an agreed schedule. But remember the trade-off: territory committed to that developer may no longer be available for someone else while you wait for those locations to open.

Your franchise architecture should reflect how your franchisees are actually most likely to succeed.

Before Planet Ballroom Became a Franchise

By the time I franchised Planet Ballroom®, I wasn't franchising an idea. I had three robust, highly profitable locations generating millions of dollars in revenue, margins above 20%, roughly 20–25 instructors, and a secondary events business creating another revenue stream. More importantly, I had infrastructure.

We operated a centralized call center with extended phone coverage so prospective customers didn't disappear because someone at a studio was busy teaching. I had developed extensive employee training systems. I had also invested approximately $72,000 initially into custom software specifically designed around our operation, with later development eventually pushing the investment well beyond that. The system managed scheduling, customers, marketing, multiple locations and centralized call-center operations. It also gave customers ways to engage more deeply with the brand. That distinction matters. I wasn't selling someone permission to use a logo. I was transferring an operating system.

The Economics Have to Work for Both Sides

A franchisee will typically make a substantial initial investment that may include an initial franchise fee plus whatever capital is necessary to establish the business itself. Once operating, franchise systems commonly collect ongoing royalties and may also have other properly disclosed fees associated with services or systems.

At Planet Ballroom, for example, I charged technology fees to support our proprietary software. I also charged for centralized call-center services. Those experiences taught me something less obvious about franchise design: every fee creates behavior. If a fee depends on information franchisees report, ask what happens when reporting honestly costs them money. A perfectly reasonable spreadsheet model can create a terrible human incentive.

Franchising isn't merely financial engineering. You're designing a system inhabited by people.

The Real Franchiseability Test

The mistake is asking, “Could I franchise this?” Ask instead:

Have I created something another person can operate profitably without needing to become me?

Your brand needs value. Your unit economics need room for the franchisee to earn an attractive return after royalties and other costs. Your systems need to be teachable. Training has to transfer knowledge. Technology and support need to make the franchisee stronger. And the business cannot depend entirely on the founder's personality, relationships or unusual talents.

Then comes the harder test: can you successfully recruit qualified franchisees? Many founders imagine hundreds of territories on a map before proving they can consistently attract, train and support even ten strong operators. Selling franchises is its own business capability. Supporting them is another.

And once franchisees invest serious money, the relationship changes. You now have independent business owners with expectations, opinions, fears and financial interests operating inside the system you created. Franchising is extraordinarily people-heavy. The economics can be excellent while the human dynamics remain difficult. That part shouldn't be underestimated.

The Rewire

The old assumption is:

Successful business → Franchise it → Scale everywhere.

A stronger model is:

Proven economics → Transferable operating system → Attractive franchisee economics → Replicable support → Scalable franchise system.

Franchising doesn't magically make a business scalable. It reveals whether you actually built a system that can scale through other people.

The Gambit

Before paying attorneys to create franchise documents or imagining pins across a national map, remove yourself from your existing business mentally. If someone competent—but without your experience, personality, relationships or instincts—bought your system tomorrow, what exactly would you be giving them that materially increases their probability of success?

If the answer is a proven brand, strong economics, technology, training, operating systems, marketing infrastructure and years of hard-earned knowledge, you may have something extremely valuable. If the answer is mostly you, you're probably not ready yet.

If you have built a profitable company and believe the next evolution could be franchising, book a CEO Diagnostic with me. I've been through the process as a franchisor—from building the original operating model and infrastructure to developing franchisees and expanding the system. We can look at what you've actually built, what is transferable, and whether franchising is the right growth model for where you want to go.

FAQ

What makes a business a franchise under FTC rules?

The FTC's Franchise Rule generally looks for three elements: association with the franchisor's trademark or commercial symbol, significant control or significant assistance from the franchisor, and a required payment of at least $500 within the first six months of operation.

Does a profitable business automatically make a good franchise?

No. Profitability is important, but a franchise also needs a transferable operating model, attractive economics for the franchisee, effective training and support, and a business that can succeed without depending on the founder personally.

Do franchisees need to own multiple locations to make money?

Not necessarily. Some franchise concepts work well for single-unit owner-operators, while others have economics better suited to multi-unit operators. The franchisor should understand which model produces the strongest economics before designing territories and development opportunities.

Your “License Agreement” Might Actually Be an Illegal Franchise

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:25:05 GMT

There is a dangerous assumption entrepreneurs sometimes make when they begin expanding their companies: My attorney wrote the agreement, so I must be doing this correctly.

Maybe.

But franchising is a specialized and highly regulated area of business. A general business attorney may be excellent at contracts, corporate structures, employment matters, or transactions and still not understand the nuances of federal and state franchise law.

I have now encountered this problem with multiple entrepreneurs. They believed they were operating under licensing arrangements because someone had put the word license on the agreement.

There is just one problem.

The government does not necessarily care what you call your agreement. It cares what the business relationship actually is.

A License Doesn't Become a License Because You Call It One

The Federal Trade Commission has specifically addressed this issue. In determining whether an arrangement falls under the Franchise Rule, the name the parties give the relationship is not controlling. The FTC generally looks for three elements: the buyer operates a business associated with the seller's trademark or trade name; the seller exercises significant control over the business or provides significant assistance; and the buyer makes a required payment meeting the Rule's threshold.

If those elements are present, calling someone a “licensee,” “dealer,” “distributor,” or something more creative may not change the regulatory reality. That matters because franchises come with significant disclosure requirements. The FTC requires prospective franchisees to receive a Franchise Disclosure Document containing 23 specific categories of information. The prospective franchisee generally must receive that document at least 14 calendar days before signing a binding agreement or paying the franchisor. This is not paperwork you want to discover you should have been providing after you already have locations operating around the country.

The Dessert Shop That Looked Suspiciously Like a Franchise

One of our Lemonade Maker® Strategies members, Derek, bought into a dessert concept structured as a license.

Then he described the business to me. He had invested money. He opened a physical location. The company's name and logo were on the building. He was using its colors, mascot, branding and business systems. Yet the relationship had been presented to him as licensing rather than franchising.

I immediately saw a question that deserved specialized legal review: Is this actually a license under applicable law, or has someone created a franchise while calling it something else? That's an especially important question for the company selling these arrangements. It reportedly has a few dozen locations around the country.

Derek's immediate exposure may be different from the licensor's, although questions surrounding compliance could potentially complicate matters such as eventually transferring or selling the business. The larger lesson isn't that I can declare their agreement illegal from the outside. I can't, and this article isn't legal advice.

The lesson is that this is exactly the kind of situation where guessing is reckless.

The Attorney's Business Card Isn't the Qualification

Another member, Travis, came to me with a distribution company that he wanted to expand. He already had a Florida location operating under a license agreement. As we worked through the business model, however, something became clear: Travis didn't merely want independent distributors selling his products. He wanted operators building businesses under his brand, with an ongoing relationship and a replicable system.

That changed the conversation.

I explained why I believed his planned structure needed to be evaluated as a franchise rather than simply assuming the existing license agreement was sufficient. Then we brought in a trusted attorney who specializes in franchising. She agreed with the direction.

That distinction matters to me. I wasn't replacing the attorney. I was helping Travis understand what he was actually trying to build so that the right attorney could properly structure it.

Strategy Comes Before the Legal Documents

This is where entrepreneurs sometimes get the sequence backward. They go to an attorney and say, “I need a license agreement.” The attorney creates one. But the more important question should have come first: What exactly are you trying to build?

With Travis, we examined the business strategically before finalizing the legal structure. We worked through the brand, positioning, business model, expansion strategy, economics, operating relationship and what franchisees would actually be buying. That work did more than help prepare him for the legal process. It caused us to rethink the company itself. We repositioned the brand. We found opportunities that weren't obvious in the original distribution model. We strengthened the offer and clarified where the company could sit in the market. Once the strategic architecture was established, the franchise attorney could review it, challenge it where necessary and translate the appropriate pieces into formal legal documents and disclosures.

That division of labor can be extraordinarily valuable. A franchise attorney understands franchise law. A business strategist should be thinking about whether the underlying business deserves to be franchised in the first place.

Franchising Is Not Just a Contract

The FTC requires franchise disclosure documents to contain 23 specific items covering matters such as fees, initial investment, restrictions, franchisor assistance, litigation, financial information and the franchise system itself. And federal requirements aren't necessarily the end of the story. Several states have their own franchise registration or disclosure laws, and state requirements can operate alongside the federal Franchise Rule. Depending on what you're selling, where you're selling it and how the relationship is structured, other business-opportunity laws may also need to be considered.

The FTC separately regulates certain business opportunities, for example, requiring covered sellers to provide prescribed disclosures before a buyer signs or pays. In other words, once you start selling other people the opportunity to build businesses around something you've created, you have entered regulated territory. Treat it accordingly.

The Rewire: Structure Follows Reality

The dangerous mental shortcut is believing that your paperwork determines your business model. Reverse it. Your actual business relationship determines what legal structure and regulatory requirements may apply.

You cannot safely decide that you prefer licensing because it seems cheaper or easier and then force a franchise-shaped business into a license agreement. Nor should you assume that a general business attorney necessarily has the specialized expertise to recognize every franchise issue hidden inside your expansion model. Even the FTC recommends that prospective franchise buyers choose an attorney experienced in franchise matters. Business owners considering becoming franchisors should take the specialization issue just as seriously.

Before you franchise, license, distribute or sell any other expansion opportunity, figure out what you are actually trying to build. Who owns the customer relationship? Whose brand does the operator use? How much control will you maintain? What systems and assistance will you provide? How will you make money? What does the operator pay? What are you promising? Can the economics support both sides? And can this business model actually scale? Those aren't merely legal questions. They're CEO questions.

The Gambit

If you're thinking about expanding through licensing, franchising, dealerships, distributorships or another business-opportunity model, don't begin by asking someone to draft an agreement. Begin by designing the business. Then take that architecture to an attorney who actually specializes in the regulatory terrain you're entering.

Lemonade Maker® Strategies works with entrepreneurs on that first side of the equation: business model, positioning, branding, economics, expansion strategy, viability and the architecture of what you're trying to build. From there, specialized legal counsel can determine how the structure must be documented and brought into compliance. Book a CEO Diagnostic with Thomas Minieri to examine whether your company is actually ready for this level of expansion—and what you should build before you start selling it.

FAQ

Can I license my business instead of franchising it?

Potentially, but calling an arrangement a license doesn't determine whether it falls under the FTC Franchise Rule. The actual relationship matters. The FTC generally examines trademark association, significant control or assistance, and required payment.

How long does a prospective franchisee have to review the FDD?

Under the federal Franchise Rule, a franchisor generally must provide the required disclosure document at least 14 calendar days before the prospective franchisee signs a binding agreement or makes a payment to the franchisor or its affiliate. The FDD contains 23 required disclosure items.

Do franchises have to be registered with the FTC?

No—and this is an important correction to a common misconception. The FTC imposes federal disclosure requirements, but it does not operate a general federal franchise-registration system. Several states separately require franchise registration or impose their own disclosure laws, so the states in which franchises are offered or sold matter.

I Sold My Porsche to Buy a Building—and I’d Do It Again

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:59:43 GMT

One of the biggest misconceptions entrepreneurs have about commercial real estate is that the money has to come first. You find a property. You go to the bank. The bank approves a loan. You put down the required cash. You buy the building. That is certainly one way to do it. It is not the only way.

By the time I began expanding my real estate portfolio, I had already used SBA financing to purchase my first two commercial properties. Then I franchised my company, which changed the equation. I eventually had the resources to transition those SBA loans into investor financing, allowing my franchisees to occupy the properties while I owned the real estate separately.

At that point, I had three commercial properties in prime locations. But property number three taught me something far more valuable than how to qualify for another loan. It taught me how to make the deal itself.

The Assumption: First Get the Financing

Entrepreneurs tend to think of financing as binary. Either you qualify for the money or you don't. Either you have the down payment or you don't. Either the bank approves the transaction or the property is out of reach. That assumption makes sense because most of us are taught to approach real estate from the buyer's side of the table.

What do I need?
How much money do I need?
Will the bank approve me?

But commercial real estate involves another person—or institution—with a problem of its own. The seller wants something. The bank holding a foreclosed building wants something. The investor wants something. Sometimes what they need creates room for a deal that doesn't fit the standard template. That is where entrepreneurs have an unusual advantage. We negotiate for a living.

The Building I Couldn't Quite Afford Yet

My third property was a foreclosure owned by a bank. Instead of treating the asking price and financing structure as fixed, I dealt directly with the bank. The timing was difficult. I had just purchased property number two. I had franchised the company, which meant substantial legal expenses. And during the same period, I invested roughly $72,000 into custom software for the business.

I wanted property number three, but I didn't particularly want another major cash event that year. So I proposed something different.

Let me rent the property from you for one year. Lock in the sale now. Give me a delayed closing. At the end of the year, I'll buy it. They agreed.

I operated from the property for a year, then closed with 20 percent cash down and financing from another bank. I happened to catch the transaction at a particularly fortunate moment when the bank was willing and able to structure its foreclosed property that way. There was still one problem. I needed the down payment.

At the time, I owned a Porsche that I absolutely loved. But apparently I loved the building more. I sold the Porsche and put the money into the property. The Porsche was a depreciating luxury sitting in my driveway. The commercial building could become an income-producing asset sitting on my balance sheet. That wasn't much of a contest.

Then I Did It Again in Atlanta

Property number four came when I opened a new location in Atlanta. This time the property wasn't owned by a bank. It was owned by a family investment firm, which created a different opportunity. I proposed putting $50,000 down if they would finance the property themselves with a two-year call on the loan. In other words, they gave me two years to replace their financing with traditional long-term financing.

Why was that valuable? Because the new Atlanta operation needed time to develop cash flow. Instead of waiting until the business had already produced the financial history a conventional lender wanted, I negotiated enough runway to create that history. Once the location was operating successfully and producing revenue, I took the deal to a bank. The bank refinanced the property long term.

Again, the financing did not create the opportunity. The structure created enough time for the financing to become possible.

Bring Something to the Table

This is the principle behind Lemonology® Strategy No. 14: Bring Something to the Table. When my credit was terrible during the early years of building my company, I couldn't always bring pristine financial statements or a beautiful credit score to a negotiation. But I could bring reliable recurring revenue. Later, I could bring cash. Operating history. A growing company. A franchise system. A significant down payment. A willingness to accept reasonable terms.

Leverage does not always look like money. Sometimes it is cash flow. Sometimes it is timing. Sometimes it is certainty. Sometimes it is your willingness to solve the other party's problem. Sometimes it is $50,000. Sometimes it is selling your Porsche. The mistake is approaching a negotiation thinking only about what you need.

Old wiring:
I don't have the financing, so I can't make the deal.

The rewire:
What does the other side need, what can I bring to the table, and can we structure a deal that creates value for both of us?

That question opens possibilities a loan application never will.

The Gambit

The next time an opportunity appears financially out of reach, resist immediately asking, “Can I afford this?” Ask something more entrepreneurial:

What would have to be true for this deal to work—and what can I bring to the table to make that attractive to the other side?

Maybe the answer is still no. But don't let conventional financing make that decision before you've even started negotiating. That is part of the rare psychology of disruptive entrepreneurs. They don't merely search for available paths. They learn how to construct one. And sometimes, apparently, they sell the Porsche.

FAQ

Can you buy commercial real estate without traditional bank financing?

Yes. Depending on the seller, property, and your financial position, commercial real estate deals can sometimes be structured through seller financing, delayed closings, lease-to-purchase arrangements, private financing, or other negotiated terms. The key is understanding what the other party needs and bringing enough value to the table to make the structure worthwhile for both sides.

What is creative financing in commercial real estate?

Creative financing simply means structuring a transaction outside the standard “bank loan plus down payment” model. That might include seller financing, delayed financing, leasing before closing, private capital, or negotiating terms that give the buyer time to improve cash flow or qualify for conventional financing later.

How do entrepreneurs create leverage when buying real estate?

Leverage is not limited to having a lot of cash. Strong revenue, operating history, a meaningful down payment, reliable tenancy, flexibility on terms, speed, or solving a problem for the seller can all create leverage. The better question is not just, “What do I need?” but, “What can I bring to the table that makes this deal attractive to them?”

How Business Owners Can Use Entrepreneurship to Build a Real Estate Portfolio

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:31:58 GMT

A few years ago, a guy helping move us from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Charleston, South Carolina apparently Googled my name. Somewhere along the way, he discovered that I had owned several commercial properties and other real estate. He asked me a simple question: “How do I get into real estate like you did?”

I gave him an answer he probably wasn't expecting.

Don't start with real estate. Start by making more money.

That may sound strange coming from someone who believes strongly in real estate. Buying commercial property was one of the best financial strategies I ever pursued. But I didn't build wealth by deciding one morning that I wanted to become a “real estate investor.” I built a successful business first. That distinction changes everything.

Real Estate Is Often the Second Engine

There is an enormous industry built around convincing ordinary people that real estate is their escape hatch. Buy a rental. House hack. Get a duplex. Use leverage. Collect passive income. Sometimes those strategies work. But they skip an uncomfortable question:

Where does the financial capacity to buy good real estate come from?

If you're earning a modest wage, have limited savings, and need significant financing, your options are constrained. A leveraged rental property must generate enough rent to cover the mortgage, taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, vacancies and surprises before it produces meaningful cash flow.

The psychological mistake is what I call a sequence error . We see wealthy people owning real estate and conclude that buying real estate is how they started becoming wealthy. Often, we're looking at step seven and mistaking it for step one.

My step one was entrepreneurship. I built a real company that produced meaningful revenue and profit. That income gave me something far more valuable than the appearance of wealth. It gave me options .

I Wanted Assets Before I Wanted the Dream House

As my business became successful, I could have started upgrading everything. Bigger house. Better cars. More expensive lifestyle. I didn't.

This is the idea behind Lemonology® Strategy No. 36: The Rich Buy Assets from Lemonade Maker®. When money finally begins arriving, entrepreneurs face an important choice: use success to look wealthier or use success to become wealthier. I chose the second.

I invested in gold and silver because, based on my analysis at the time, I believed they were undervalued. My positions ultimately returned roughly two to three times what I had invested. The broader historical move was real: gold climbed dramatically from the late 2000s into 2011, while silver experienced an even more explosive run during that period. Those gains, combined with cash generated by my company, helped provide the capital for my first commercial real estate down payment. Then something interesting happened. My business became the bridge into real estate.

Let Your Business Help You Buy the Building

Obtaining financing as a pure real estate investor can be difficult. But when an operating company needs a building, the equation can change. I acquired commercial property for my dance company to occupy. The real estate was held separately, while the operating company used the space. Instead of sending rent to an unrelated landlord every month, I was building ownership in another asset.

That concept remains relevant today. SBA 7(a) loans can be used to acquire or improve real estate used by an operating business, while the SBA 504 program provides long-term financing for major fixed assets such as land and buildings. The 504 program specifically excludes passive and speculative businesses.

Over the following years, I acquired three more commercial properties. At the same time, Elizabeth and I remained relatively conservative about our personal residences. When we upgraded from our small townhouse to a larger townhouse, we kept the first property. When we eventually purchased our first freestanding home, we kept the second townhouse rather than continually converting every increase in income into a more expensive lifestyle. That sequencing mattered.

Stop Letting the Bank Define What You Can Afford

One of the strangest financial rituals in America happens when a bank tells someone the maximum mortgage they qualify for—and that number quietly becomes their housing budget. Those are not the same thing.

Interestingly, the word mortgage comes from the Old French mort gage , literally meaning “dead pledge.” I jokingly call it the death pledge because entrepreneurs should think very carefully before committing enormous portions of their future cash flow to a house merely because a lender says they can.

A personal residence can absolutely appreciate and build equity. On a conventional balance sheet, it is an asset. But it is not necessarily the kind of productive asset I care most about as an entrepreneur. If it requires money every month rather than producing money, it competes with capital that could be funding your company, acquiring another property or creating another income stream.

Don't become house-rich and opportunity-poor.

The Advantage of Being Positioned When Everything Falls Apart

My real estate story also benefited from timing. The financial crisis crushed real estate prices. U.S. house-price data show a steep decline from the 2007 peak through the aftermath of the 2008–2009 crash. For millions of people, that period was devastating. But my operating company was highly profitable. That meant I was positioned very differently.

When the economy crashes, assets can become cheap precisely because the people who would normally buy them no longer have the money, credit or confidence to act. The opportunity and the ability to capture the opportunity are two completely different things. This is why I don't fear every downturn. I want to be financially positioned for one.

That connects directly to Lemonology® Strategy No. 37: The Price Maker and the Price Taker . Ownership gives entrepreneurs more levers. A business owner can adjust prices when the market permits. A landlord may be able to adjust rents as leases turn over. Owners can acquire assets, refinance strategically, improve properties or redeploy capital. You have agency. The person living paycheck to paycheck and carrying the largest mortgage the bank would approve has considerably fewer choices.

The Rewire: Build the Money Machine Before Buying the Assets

The old wiring says:

I want wealth → I should start buying real estate.

My experience taught me something different:

Build a valuable business → generate income → preserve capital → acquire productive assets → let those assets expand your choices.

Real estate wasn't my lottery ticket.

Entrepreneurship gave me the financial power to buy real estate intelligently. And eventually, the assets helped protect and expand the wealth created by the business. That's the sequence.

The Gambit

Before upgrading your house or rushing out to buy your first rental property, ask yourself a different question:

What income engine do I need to build today so that when the next extraordinary asset opportunity appears, I actually have the money and courage to buy it?

Then build that first.

Lemonology® Strategies No. 36 and 37 are explored further in Lemonade Maker®, along with the entrepreneurial decisions that allowed me to turn business income into assets, assets into options, and economic disruption into opportunity.

FAQ

Should entrepreneurs invest in their business or real estate first?

If the business has strong economics and room to grow, increasing business income can create the capital and borrowing capacity needed to purchase real estate later. The right sequence depends on the economics of both opportunities rather than a universal rule.

Can a business owner buy the commercial property their company occupies?

Yes. Business owners can purchase property for their operating company, and programs including SBA 7(a) and 504 financing may support qualifying owner-occupied commercial real estate purchases.

Is your primary residence an asset?

Technically, yes: a home has economic value and belongs on a personal balance sheet as an asset. The Lemonology distinction is about productive assets —assets that generate income or expand your financial capacity rather than simply consuming monthly cash flow.

The Self-Employment Trap: Why Owning a Business Doesn’t Make You an Entrepreneur

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:35:47 GMT

Millions of people describe themselves as entrepreneurs because they started a business. They formed an LLC, found customers, hired employees, built a website, and perhaps even put “CEO” underneath their name. But owning a business does not necessarily make you an entrepreneur. You may simply be self-employed.

There is nothing wrong with self-employment. A talented consultant, attorney, designer, coach, contractor, physician, accountant, or other professional can build an excellent living around personal expertise. The problem begins when someone believes they have built a company when what they have actually built is a job that happens to have their name on the ownership documents. That distinction matters because the two models create value in fundamentally different ways.

The Business That Cannot Escape You

In self-employment, you are the primary source of value . Customers want your expertise. Your résumé matters. Your credentials matter. Your relationships matter. Your personal reputation matters. Perhaps most importantly, your individual ability to deliver an exceptional product or service matters.

Take yourself away and something important disappears. That is why one of the simplest tests of the self-employment trap is not how many employees you have. It is this:

Where does the value live?

If the best work still has to be done by you, important decisions keep coming back to you, customers insist on working with you, employees constantly need your intervention, or quality falls noticeably when you step away, the value still lives primarily inside the founder. You haven't fully built a company yet. You've built an organization around yourself.

Hiring Employees Doesn't Make You an Entrepreneur

I learned this distinction personally. Early in my dance company, I eventually had seven employees. From the outside, that certainly looked like a growing company. I had staff, customers, revenue, responsibilities, and all the complexity that comes with managing other people.

But I was still self-employed.

I was still one of the best instructors. Customers wanted to work directly with me. I was personally overseeing other instructors and helping manage their students. Important problems came back to me. Quality was still heavily dependent on my involvement. The business had employees, but it didn't have leverage.

This is one of the most deceptive parts of the self-employment trap. Entrepreneurs frequently assume hiring is the escape hatch. If they can just hire an assistant, another technician, a salesperson, or a few more employees, they will finally become the CEO. But hiring people around a bottleneck doesn't remove the bottleneck. Sometimes it simply gives the bottleneck more people to manage.

The Day I Finally Became the CEO

My real transition happened later, when I had two locations and roughly 12 to 15 employees. I remember walking into the studio one day and realizing something remarkable: I wasn't teaching anymore. Zero lessons.

I had transitioned my personal students to other instructors, and it had worked. Customers were still receiving the experience they expected. The instructors could deliver. The company could operate. I could spend my time running and building the business instead of personally producing the service the customer purchased. That was a profound shift. The value had begun moving away from Thomas Minieri, the dance instructor, and into the company itself. That's entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship Is the Separation of Value

A real company gradually separates its value from the founder. Instead of relying primarily on your résumé, expertise, personality, relationships, or extraordinary personal service, the value begins accumulating elsewhere: in the brand, products, methods, intellectual property, systems, technology, processes, customer experience, marketing engine, culture, people, and competitive advantages you've built. Other people can deliver what the company promises. And there are two measurements I care deeply about during that transition:

Quality and consistency.

Can someone other than you deliver the quality customers expect? And can the company reproduce that quality consistently? If the answer is no, you still have work to do. The objective isn't to make the founder irrelevant. Some founders remain incredibly important to innovation, strategy, leadership, brand development, relationships, or vision. The objective is to stop making the founder indispensable to routine value delivery. That's a very different idea.

Stop Trying to Become More Valuable

The self-employment trap creates another psychological distortion: the constant pursuit of greater personal value. Get another certification. Learn another skill. Become better at sales. Become a better practitioner. Add another service. Work faster. Become so exceptional that customers would be crazy to choose anyone else. Those things can make you extraordinarily successful at self-employment. They can also make escaping it harder.

Entrepreneurship asks a different question:

How do I make the company more valuable without requiring more of me?

That question changes what you build.

You start creating methods instead of improvising. You train people instead of rescuing them. You build a brand customers trust beyond your personal identity. You create marketing that produces opportunities without depending entirely on your relationships. You develop meaningful competitive advantages that belong to the company. You stop merely performing the work. You start building the machine.

The Rewire: Build Something Bigger Than You

This is why escaping the Self-Employment Trap™ is one of the three forces inside what I call The Profit Principle . The other two are building a real marketing system and giving customers a meaningful reason to choose you. These forces reinforce each other. Better marketing creates opportunity and resources. Competitive advantage gives that marketing something meaningful to communicate. And stronger systems, people, and infrastructure allow the company to capture those opportunities without everything collapsing back onto the founder.

I'll link my Profit Principle video with this article because it goes much deeper into how these pieces work together. At Lemonade Maker® Strategies, this transition is central to what we teach. We help entrepreneurs develop the rare psychology of disruptive entrepreneurs: how to See What Others Miss. Create Unfair Advantage. And Become Irreplaceable in the AI Era. And becoming irreplaceable does not mean making your company hopelessly dependent on you. Quite the opposite. It means becoming exceptional at building things that create value beyond you.

The Gambit

Take yourself out of your business mentally for a moment. What remains? If quality collapses, customers disappear, decisions stop, marketing stalls, employees become lost, or revenue immediately follows you out the door, you've just discovered where your business still needs to grow.

Don't hire another person simply to give yourself another person to manage. Start moving value out of yourself and into the company. Then book a CEO Diagnostic with me. We'll look at where you're trapped in self-employment, where you're spinning your wheels in the entrepreneur rat race, and what needs to change in your business model, marketing, systems, and competitive edge so you can start building a company that works beyond you.

Because owning your own job may make you self-employed.

Building something that can create value beyond you is entrepreneurship.

The Five-Figure "Expert" Telling You How to Build a Seven-Figure Business

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:38:07 GMT

Business is one of the strangest professions in the world because expertise is remarkably difficult to verify. Nobody can fake being a surgeon for very long. Nobody can walk into an airport, announce that they understand aviation, and start flying commercial jets because they have an impressive Instagram account.

Business is different. Someone can build a beautiful website, create a polished personal brand, collect certifications, start a podcast, call themselves a strategist and begin advising entrepreneurs almost immediately. Confidence is easy to manufacture. Authority can be manufactured too.

Competence is much harder. And that creates one of the most dangerous distortions in entrepreneurship: false authority—the assumption that someone who appears knowledgeable must be qualified to tell you what to do.

Welcome to the Coaching Industrial Complex

There is an uncomfortable mismatch hiding inside modern business advice. A surprising amount of strategic guidance comes from gig-economy workers earning five figures while advising entrepreneurs how to build seven-figure companies. That does not mean they are unintelligent or untalented. A web designer may be an excellent web designer. A Meta ads specialist may understand Meta ads extremely well. A social media manager may create terrific content.

The problem begins when expertise in one component gets mistaken for authority over the entire machine. Knowing how to design a website does not mean you understand pricing strategy, hiring, cash flow, sales, customer psychology, leadership, operations, technology, differentiation and scalability. Running ads for companies is not the same thing as carrying payroll while figuring out whether those ads are actually creating profitable customers.

Yet entrepreneurs routinely hand enormous strategic influence to people who have never built the type of company they are being paid to advise. That is not an insult (mostly). It is a mismatch.

The Apprentice Who Became a Sage Overnight

In Lemonade Maker®, Lemonology® Strategy No. 92, The Flight of the Entrepreneur , describes entrepreneurial development through four stages: Apprentice, Warrior, King and Sage. The apprentice learns the craft. The warrior leaves the safety of theory and tests those skills in the real world. The king survives enough battles to build something larger than themselves—customers, employees, systems, culture and an organization that depends on their leadership. Eventually, the sage can look backward and help others navigate terrain they have personally crossed.

The modern business-advice industry has created a shortcut:

Apprentice → Sage.

Skip the warrior stage. Skip the king stage. Start coaching.

That is how you end up with people who have never built a significant company teaching other people how to build significant companies.

Revenue Alone Doesn’t Prove Much Either

This is where evaluating real authority becomes more sophisticated. Revenue matters. Building a company that generates millions of dollars is rare and meaningful evidence. But even revenue alone does not tell you enough.

What created it?

How many customers were involved? How complicated was the operation? How many employees had to perform consistently? How many markets were served? Could the founder teach other people to reproduce the systems? Was the entrepreneur dependent on one giant client, one sales channel or one unusually expensive product?

My first company generated more than $12 million in revenue. But the number I find equally important is what happened underneath it.

At our scale, we were handling more than 15,000 annual sales transactions, typically ranging from roughly $250 to $1,200. I led more than 50 employees and 23 franchisees. We marketed multiple locations across different American markets, built a recognizable consumer brand, trained teams, developed systems and used technology to coordinate an increasingly complicated organization.

I had to understand advertising, sales, branding, customer behavior, employee behavior, technology and operations because they were interconnected. When platforms changed, we adapted. When markets differed, we adjusted. When something stopped converting, there was nowhere to hide behind a client report. It was my company. That is the warrior and king stage in Strategy #92: experience earned through consequences.

Even Experience Is Not Enough

Here is the part many coaches conveniently overlook. Having done something does not automatically make you good at teaching it. A brilliant entrepreneur may understand their own company intuitively yet be terrible at explaining why it worked. Their advice can become, “Do what I did,” even when your industry, personality, resources, customers and circumstances are completely different.

Real strategic guidance requires another ability: perspective transfer . I need to understand your business from your side of the table. That means teaching rather than simply prescribing. Diagnosing rather than assuming. Understanding what you already know, what you do not know, what resources you actually have and what constraints you are operating under.

The objective is not to make you dependent on my expertise. It is to make you more capable because of it. That philosophy sits at the center of Lemonade Maker® Strategies. My experience matters, but experience is only the raw material. The greater value is turning those lessons into frameworks other entrepreneurs can understand, test and apply to businesses that look nothing like mine.

The Rewire: Verify the Flight Path

Stop asking whether someone looks successful. Ask what path produced their authority. What did they apprentice in? What battles did they fight? What did they actually build? How many customers, employees, transactions, markets and systems did they manage? Can they explain what went wrong as clearly as what went right? And perhaps most importantly:

Can they understand your business without immediately trying to turn it into theirs?

That is the difference between someone selling expertise and someone capable of transferring it.

The Gambit

Before taking your next piece of expensive business advice, investigate the person giving it.

Do not ask only, “What do you know?”

Ask:

“What have you actually built—and what makes you qualified to help me build mine?”

The answer may save you years of following an apprentice dressed like a sage.

FAQ

How can I tell if a business coach is actually qualified?
Look beyond branding, followers and certifications. Examine what they have actually built, the scale and complexity they managed, the results they produced and whether their experience resembles the challenges they are advising you to solve.

Does a marketing expert need to have built a business?
Not necessarily to perform a specialized marketing task. But advising the overall direction of a company requires broader business understanding than executing a single marketing function.

Is business revenue enough to prove expertise?
No. Revenue is useful evidence, but transaction volume, profitability, employees, operational complexity, customer acquisition, leadership responsibilities and the ability to reproduce and teach successful systems provide a much fuller picture.

Stop Paying Someone Else to Understand Your Marketing

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:41:19 GMT

A business owner recently told me he was spending $1,500 a month on marketing. His consultant handled Google Ads, SEO, occasional website edits, and one blog article each month. He thought it was a pretty good deal because marketing was “off his plate.” Then I asked a simple question: How much of the $1,500 is actually going toward Google Ads? He didn't know. Maybe $500, he guessed.

That means he could be spending roughly $1,000 every month on management, SEO he couldn't explain, website edits he rarely needed, and a generic article that could be created with AI in minutes. Meanwhile, he was frustrated because his Google Ads weren't generating enough leads. This is where delegation quietly becomes something very different. It becomes marketing abdication .

“I Don't Have Time to Learn Marketing”

Entrepreneurs are constantly told they should work on their businesses instead of in them. There is truth in that idea. A CEO shouldn't personally perform every function forever. But that principle can easily become an excuse for strategic ignorance.

“I don't have time to learn Google Ads.”

“I don't understand SEO.”

“I don't want to mess with the website.”

“I'd rather have someone handle all of that.”

The entrepreneur feels relieved because someone else is responsible for marketing. The monthly fee starts to feel like the price of peace of mind. But there is a difference between delegating execution and surrendering understanding . If you can't explain what your SEO provider actually does, don't know how much money is reaching the advertising platforms, can't identify which campaigns produce customers, and can't determine whether your results justify your spending, you haven't simply delegated marketing. You've delegated your ability to evaluate it.

The Management-Fee Trap

The math can become surprisingly ugly. Consider the entrepreneur spending $1,500 per month. If approximately $500 reaches Google and the remaining $1,000 pays for management and assorted services, two-thirds of his marketing budget isn't buying advertising at all. That isn't automatically unreasonable. Great expertise can absolutely be worth paying for. A talented professional who improves conversion, prevents expensive mistakes, develops strategy, and produces measurable returns can create tremendous value. The problem is paying significant management fees without knowing whether that value exists .

Suppose the actual work during a typical month consists of reviewing an existing Google Ads account, producing one AI-assisted blog article, checking SEO tools, and making few or no website changes. If that work takes two hours, a $1,000 management allocation effectively costs $500 an hour. If it takes one hour, the effective rate is $1,000. Most entrepreneurs never perform that calculation.

Instead, they evaluate the package psychologically: Someone is handling my marketing for $1,500. That sounds very different from: I'm spending $500 reaching potential customers and possibly $1,000 paying someone to manage it.

The False Comfort of Technical Complexity

Marketing services also benefit from an information imbalance. SEO, Google Ads, analytics, websites, automation, attribution, and AI sound technical enough that entrepreneurs often assume they shouldn't understand them. That assumption creates dependency.

The answer isn't that every entrepreneur should become a professional media buyer, web developer, or SEO specialist. It's that modern entrepreneurs should understand their marketing well enough to make intelligent decisions about it. You should know how much you're spending on advertising. You should understand what your campaigns are trying to accomplish. You should know where leads originate and what happens after they arrive. You should be able to open your own accounts and understand the important numbers.

Technology has actually made much of this easier, not harder. AI can help develop content, analyze information, explain unfamiliar settings, generate ideas, and dramatically shorten the learning curve. Paying hundreds of dollars for generic AI-generated articles is especially difficult to justify when the entrepreneur's real expertise can be captured and turned into much more original content. The goal isn't DIY everything. The goal is understand enough that nobody can hide behind complexity .

From Marketing Abdication to Marketing Ownership

This is how we approach marketing inside Lemonade Maker®. We want members to reduce unnecessary agency dependency while increasing their own marketing capability. During working strategy sessions, we can get directly into an entrepreneur's advertising accounts, website, content, offers, or campaigns together. Members also have direct chat access for questions, two live strategy workshops each month, and access to premium marketing tools.

The important difference is philosophical. We're not trying to create another black box that entrepreneurs depend upon. We're trying to help entrepreneurs understand and control the machine themselves.

Consider the same $1,500 monthly budget. Under the arrangement described earlier, approximately $500 may reach Google while roughly $1,000 pays for management and related services.

A $379 Lemonade Maker® membership would leave $1,121 available for advertising from that same $1,500 budget. That's more than twice the approximate media spend—while the entrepreneur is simultaneously learning how the marketing works, receiving strategic guidance, and building a capability that remains inside the company.

Your Marketing Should Become an Asset You Understand

The old mental model is simple:

I don't understand marketing → hire someone who does → stop worrying about it.

A stronger model is:

Understand the system → get expert guidance where needed → delegate selectively → measure everything → retain strategic control.

That's the difference between dependency and leverage. Marketing is too important to become a mysterious monthly bill. You don't need to personally click every button forever, but you should understand where your money goes, what your marketing is supposed to accomplish, and whether it actually works. Because the most expensive marketing expense may not be your ad spend. It may be everything you're paying because you've convinced yourself you're incapable of understanding it.

The Gambit

Open your last marketing invoice and ask five questions: How much went directly toward reaching customers? What exactly was done with the rest? How many hours of meaningful work did that probably require? What measurable result did it create? And which parts could you understand or manage yourself with the right guidance?

You may discover that you don't need a bigger marketing budget.

You need more of your existing budget to actually reach customers.

If you're ready to stop renting your understanding of marketing, Lemonade Maker® is built differently. Instead of another agency black box, we'll work alongside you to help you understand your marketing, improve it, and build the capability inside your own business.

FAQ

Should small business owners manage their own Google Ads?

Not necessarily without guidance, but business owners should understand their accounts, budgets, targeting, results, and basic optimization. Execution can eventually be delegated without surrendering strategic control.

How much of my marketing budget should go toward agency management?

There is no universal percentage. The better question is whether the management expense produces enough measurable value to justify taking that money away from media spend and other marketing investments.

Should I fire my marketing agency?

Not simply because it charges a management fee. First determine what the agency actually does, what results it produces, how much work requires genuine expertise, and whether your business could achieve better economics through selective outsourcing and stronger internal capability.

Should I Pay for SEO? What Small Business Owners Need to Know First

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:32:49 GMT

SEO has become one of those things small-business owners are told they are supposed to have. You need a website. You need social media. You need SEO. And if you are not ranking on Google, someone will happily explain why you should be paying them $1,500, $2,500, or $5,000 a month to fix it.

The problem is that many business owners paying for SEO cannot explain what they are buying. They receive reports filled with keyword rankings, backlinks, domain authority, impressions, technical audits, and colorful graphs. Something appears to be happening. But ask the question that actually matters— “How much profitable business is this producing?” —and things often get surprisingly fuzzy. SEO can absolutely create enormous value. But that does not mean your business needs to pay an SEO company. Those are two very different ideas.

What Is SEO, Really?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Strip away the jargon and the basic idea is simple: make it easier for search engines to understand your website and more likely that your pages appear when people search for something relevant to your business. That can involve making sure Google can properly crawl and index your website, improving page structure and content, understanding what potential customers search for, creating useful pages that answer those searches, strengthening local search visibility, and earning links or authority from other websites.

None of that is imaginary. Search visibility can be extremely valuable. But SEO is not a magical substance applied to a website. And paying someone to “do SEO” does not mean meaningful search traffic will materialize.

Consider one extraordinary statistic. Ahrefs analyzed roughly 14 billion pages in its Content Explorer database and estimated that 96.55% received zero organic traffic from Google . Another 1.94% received only one to ten visits per month. Ahrefs acknowledges limitations in the dataset and estimates, but its broader conclusion is difficult to ignore: the overwhelming majority of published pages receive essentially no meaningful Google traffic.

Why? Among the major reasons Ahrefs identified were pages targeting subjects nobody searches for, insufficient authority or backlinks for competitive subjects, and content that does not match what the searcher actually wants. That should change the question from:

“Am I doing SEO?”

to:

“Am I doing SEO capable of putting me in the small percentage that actually gets found?”

Why Business Owners Keep Buying SEO They Don't Understand

SEO has an unusual psychological advantage as a professional service: most clients cannot easily evaluate the work themselves.

If you hire someone to paint your building, you can see the building. If you hire someone to repair your air conditioner, you know whether the room gets cold.

SEO is different. A provider can show you twenty pages of metrics without establishing whether those metrics matter economically. A keyword ranking sounds impressive until you discover almost nobody searches for the phrase. Publishing four articles every month sounds productive until none of them attract qualified prospects. Increasing impressions sounds encouraging until those impressions produce no meaningful customers.

This creates fertile ground for false authority and information asymmetry . The provider understands terminology the buyer does not, so complexity itself can begin to resemble expertise. Fear makes the problem worse. Business owners hear that competitors are “dominating Google,” that algorithms are changing, or that failing to invest now will leave them permanently behind. Eventually SEO stops being an investment decision and becomes an insurance policy against an outcome they don't understand. That is a terrible reason to spend money.

The 3.45% Question

The Ahrefs research does not prove that 96.55% of SEO is useless. That would be an abuse of the research. It studied pages, not SEO agencies or their clients. What it demonstrates is something more useful: publishing a page does not create search traffic merely because the page exists.

Ahrefs found that pages need to target subjects with actual search demand, compete realistically for those searches, and satisfy the intent behind them. Competitive searches may also require meaningful authority and backlinks. This means an SEO strategy should begin with economics and customer behavior, not keywords.

Suppose you own a specialized local service business. There may be hundreds or thousands of people actively searching every month for exactly what you sell. Ranking prominently for those searches could produce customers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. Paying for expert SEO may be one of the smartest investments you make.

Now imagine you sell an unusual B2B service that customers rarely know exists until a salesperson explains it to them. Search demand may be tiny. You could have a technically magnificent SEO campaign and still generate very little business because your customers aren't searching for the solution in the first place. SEO cannot capture demand that does not exist.

Do You Actually Need to Pay Someone?

For many small businesses, surprisingly large parts of basic SEO can be managed internally. A modern website platform can handle much of the technical foundation. A business owner can learn to write clear page titles and descriptions, build useful service pages, answer real customer questions, maintain accurate business information, improve a Google Business Profile, monitor Google Search Console, and create genuinely useful content.

AI has also dramatically reduced the cost of researching, outlining, drafting, and improving content. That doesn't eliminate the need for judgment, expertise, originality, or strategy. It does make the old model of automatically paying thousands of dollars for routine articles increasingly difficult to justify.

Professional help becomes more valuable when the problem becomes genuinely specialized: a large or technically complicated website, a highly competitive search market, sophisticated content architecture, difficult technical problems, serious link acquisition, ecommerce at scale, or an opportunity valuable enough that expert execution produces a measurable return.

The dividing line should not be “SEO is complicated.” It should be “Does specialized expertise create enough additional economic value to justify its cost?”

The Rewire: Don't Outsource What You Don't Understand

The old wiring looks like this:

My business needs SEO → SEO is complicated → hire an agency → assume the reports mean it is working.

Replace it with:

Understand the opportunity → identify what actually matters → learn enough to make informed decisions → get expert help where you need it → stay in control of your own business.

You do not need to become an SEO professional. You probably don't want to spend your evenings studying technical search optimization, either.But there is an enormous difference between getting expert help and becoming dependent on experts you cannot evaluate .

That distinction is one of the ideas behind Lemonade Maker® Strategies.

Instead of paying thousands of dollars every month to an agency and hoping something useful is happening behind the curtain, our $379 monthly membership helps entrepreneurs develop the knowledge, systems, and judgment to understand what is happening inside their own businesses.

Your membership includes a monthly hands-on session with us to work directly on your marketing and SEO. We can look at what you're currently doing, help you understand what matters, identify what doesn't, and work alongside you to improve it.

The goal isn't to turn you into an SEO technician.

The goal is to end agency dependency .

And marketing is only one part of the membership. Members also receive two live, members-only workshops each month designed to strengthen their expertise as entrepreneurs, real-time chat access directly with Thomas Minieri, an extensive archive of workshops and masterclasses, and marketing tools, resources, discounts, and member-only deals. Because the strongest entrepreneur isn't the person who knows how to do everything. It's the person who understands enough to know what should be done, why it matters, and whether the people helping them are actually doing it well.

The Gambit: Get a Second Opinion Before You Spend Another Dollar

Before you renew another SEO contract, increase your marketing budget, or sign a new agency agreement, find out what you're actually paying for.

Book a CEO Diagnostic and we'll include an Unbiased Marketing Audit of your current marketing and SEO.

We'll help you understand what's working, what's questionable, what may be unnecessary, what opportunities you're missing, and where your money could be better spent.

No jargon.

No mystery reports.

And no incentive to sell you a $2,500-a-month SEO retainer.

Just a second opinion from entrepreneurs helping you see your business more clearly.

Before you buy more marketing, understand the marketing you already have.

FAQ

Is SEO worth paying for a small business?

It can be, especially when customers actively search for what you sell and ranking for those searches can produce enough profitable business to justify the cost. SEO should be evaluated as an investment, not an automatic monthly expense.

Can I do SEO myself?

Many small-business owners can manage basic SEO themselves, including service pages, local optimization, customer-focused content, page titles, internal links, and basic search-performance monitoring. Specialized help becomes more valuable as competition and technical complexity increase.

How do I know whether my SEO company is actually working?

Look beyond rankings and activity reports. Determine whether relevant organic traffic, qualified inquiries, leads, sales, or other economically meaningful outcomes are improving—and whether those improvements justify what you are spending.

Research source: Ahrefs — 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google . Their 2026 statistics roundup continues to cite the 96.55% figure, while newer research also shows how difficult organic visibility remains.

The Streetlight Effect: Why Entrepreneurs Blame Marketing for Everything

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:57:30 GMT

When a business isn't growing, one diagnosis seems to appear faster than almost any other:

We need better marketing.

Not enough customers? Marketing problem. Revenue stalled? Marketing problem. Competitor pulling ahead? Marketing problem. Need to grow faster? Run ads, rebuild the website, post more content, hire an SEO company, start a podcast, redesign the funnel.

Sometimes marketing really is the problem.

But there is a dangerous assumption hiding inside the reflex: If the business is producing disappointing results, insufficient marketing must be the cause. That is not diagnosis. It is guessing—and psychology helps explain why the guess is so seductive.

The Light Is Better Over Here

There is a well-known idea called the Streetlight Effect , sometimes called the drunkard's search principle. The story involves a man searching under a streetlight for something he lost somewhere else. When asked why he is looking there, he explains that the light is better.

Researchers use the term to describe an observational bias in which we search where investigation is easiest rather than necessarily where the answer is most likely to exist. More recent economic research has examined a related problem: available data can actually concentrate attention on attractive, visible areas while discouraging exploration elsewhere.

Marketing may be the brightest streetlight in entrepreneurship. Marketing is visible. You can look at traffic, clicks, followers, leads, rankings, conversion rates and ad performance. You can redesign a website, change an offer headline, increase an advertising budget or hire another agency. Most importantly, you can do something .

Compare that with asking whether your business model is fundamentally weak.

Or whether customers simply do not value your product enough.

Or whether your pricing makes the economics impossible.

Or whether your service has become interchangeable with fifteen competitors.

Or whether customers buy once and never come back because the experience isn't particularly good.

Those questions are darker. They are harder to measure, harder to solve and considerably more threatening to the entrepreneur who created the business. So we search where the light is.

Marketing Also Has a Very Large Sales Force

There is another force reinforcing the obsession. An enormous industry exists to sell business owners marketing solutions. SEO companies diagnose SEO problems. Advertising agencies recommend advertising. Social media agencies recommend more social content. Web designers discover website problems. Lead-generation companies discover lead problems.

That doesn't automatically make their advice dishonest. Specialists naturally see businesses through the lens of their specialty.

But it creates an incentive problem entrepreneurs should understand. If you walk into a tire store and ask why your car isn't running properly, you should not be surprised when somebody starts examining the tires. They may even find something wrong with them. That still doesn't mean the tires caused the engine to stall.

Marketing advice can work the same way. A company may genuinely improve your website, rankings, content or advertising while leaving the actual business constraint untouched. The metrics improve. The business doesn't.

What Poor Growth Actually Tells You

Strip away the assumption and disappointing growth tells you something much less satisfying:

Something within the business-customer system is preventing sufficient economic progress.

That's it. Marketing is one possible explanation. Maybe too few qualified people know you exist. Maybe your acquisition channels really are weak. Maybe competitors are communicating their value more effectively. But the constraint could also be pricing, positioning, sales conversion, customer value, retention, differentiation, operational capacity, market demand or the underlying economics of the business.

Imagine doubling your leads tomorrow. Would revenue double? If your answer is no, you may have just discovered why buying more traffic isn't the first problem worth solving. More leads flowing into an offer customers don't understand merely creates more confused prospects. More advertising behind weak economics loses money faster. More attention directed toward an undifferentiated business allows more people to discover that they have no compelling reason to choose it. Marketing can amplify what already exists. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. Sometimes amplification is the last thing you need.

Diagnosis Before Prescription

The stronger mental model is not:

Poor results → Better marketing

It is:

Poor results → Find the constraint → Solve the constraint → Determine marketing's appropriate role

That sounds less exciting because diagnosis usually is. It may force you to discover that the business you spent years building needs to change. You may have to raise prices, simplify the offer, eliminate a service, change the customer, improve the experience, rebuild the economics or admit that something customers once valued no longer matters as much. Those are harder conversations than deciding whether Google Ads or Meta Ads will produce the better ROAS. But entrepreneurship is not a contest to see who can manipulate the brightest dashboard.

It is a search for reality.

And occasionally the most important thing an entrepreneur can do is walk away from the streetlight and start looking where the problem might actually be.

The Gambit

Before spending another dollar trying to generate more attention, ask one uncomfortable question:

If twice as many customers discovered my business tomorrow, what weakness would become twice as obvious?

Start there. The answer may still be marketing. But now you will have diagnosed it instead of merely assuming it. And that difference can save an entrepreneur an extraordinary amount of money.

FAQ

Why do business owners assume they need more marketing?
Marketing is highly visible, measurable and easy to change. Problems involving pricing, customer value, differentiation or the business model are often harder and more uncomfortable to examine.

Can better marketing fix a struggling business?
Yes, when insufficient awareness, poor communication or weak customer acquisition is the actual constraint. Marketing cannot reliably compensate for weak value, bad economics, poor retention or an unattractive offer.

What should a business owner examine before increasing marketing spending?
Determine where economic progress is breaking down: awareness, conversion, pricing, customer value, retention, differentiation, operations or the underlying business model. Diagnose the constraint before prescribing the solution.

Should Christians Sue? What the Bible Actually Says About Lawsuits in Business

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:14:35 GMT

There is a belief I have heard repeatedly in Christian circles: Christians shouldn't sue people. I heard it personally when I was running Planet Ballroom®. During my years as a franchisor, I filed three lawsuits involving former franchisees. One involved what I believed were defamatory accusations against me and the company. Another involved franchisees who stopped paying contractual fees while continuing to operate using our brand and intellectual property. The third involved franchise owners who professed to be Christians themselves.

Some fellow believers questioned whether filing lawsuits was compatible with my faith. It forced me to confront a much better question than, “Should Christians sue?” What does the Bible actually require of a Christian when someone causes serious harm, breaks an agreement, refuses reconciliation, or acts unjustly? The answer is considerably more complicated than “turn the other cheek.”

The Verse Christians Can't Ignore

Anyone arguing that Scripture places no restrictions on lawsuits has a problem: 1 Corinthians 6. Paul strongly rebukes Christians for taking disputes with fellow believers before secular courts. He asks why members of the church cannot find wise people among themselves capable of resolving such matters. He goes even further: sometimes suffering a wrong is preferable to damaging the witness and unity of the church through litigation.

That matters. A Christian business owner should not treat litigation as the first response to every disagreement. Pride, anger, punishment, intimidation, and the desire to “make somebody pay” are terrible reasons to sue. But that is not the same thing as saying the Bible teaches that Christians must never use courts.

In Romans 12, Paul tells believers not to take personal revenge. Immediately afterward, Romans 13 describes governing authorities as God's servants charged with responding to wrongdoing. Personal vengeance and legitimate civil justice are not treated as identical things. Paul himself also invoked his legal rights. After being unlawfully beaten and imprisoned, he refused to quietly disappear when authorities wanted him gone. Later, facing accusations, he exercised his right as a Roman citizen to appeal to Caesar.

Christianity requires humility. It does not require legal helplessness.

Turn the Other Cheek Doesn't Mean Become a Punching Bag

Jesus' instruction to turn the other cheek is one of the most important teachings on Christian non-retaliation. In the same passage, Jesus even describes surrendering more than demanded when someone sues you. A Christian cannot simply wave this passage away whenever protecting money becomes inconvenient. But Scripture also repeatedly recognizes justice, property disputes, restitution, truthful testimony, and adjudication. Exodus describes property disputes being brought before judges. Deuteronomy requires investigation of false accusations and consequences for malicious witnesses.

The biblical picture therefore isn't:

Someone wronged me → destroy them.

But neither is it:

Someone wronged me → Christianity requires me to permit it indefinitely.

The distinction is between retaliation and resolution .

Protecting Your Reputation Is Not the Same as Protecting Your Ego

The Bible does not treat a person's reputation as meaningless. Proverbs 22:1 says, “A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.” For a business owner, a good name is not merely about ego. Reputation affects customers, employees, partners, opportunities, and the livelihood of everyone depending on the business.

I experienced this when a former franchisee and her husband published accusations about me and Planet Ballroom® that I believed were demonstrably false, including allegations of dishonesty and stealing. I asked for the false statements to be removed, but they remained online until I filed a defamation lawsuit.

Once attorneys became involved, the posts came down, and I later dropped the lawsuit. I wasn't seeking a financial windfall or trying to punish them; the practical objective was to stop what I believed was false information from continuing to damage my name and my company. Sometimes pursuing legal action is not about vengeance. It is the mechanism available to stop an ongoing harm.

When My Christian Franchisees Broke Their Agreement

I faced this distinction directly with franchisees who were active Christian believers and held leadership positions in their church. They wanted out of their franchise agreement because the business had not made them wealthy as quickly as they expected. From my perspective, their location was performing within the expectations established by our franchise documents and showing promising growth. They nevertheless decided to close and refused the contractual damages associated with doing so.

Because they were believers, I tried something different. I proposed that we follow the reconciliation principles of Matthew 18. Jesus describes beginning privately, then involving witnesses, then bringing an unresolved matter before the church community. I offered to bring a pastor from my church while they brought a pastor or representative from theirs. We would present the documentation, hear both sides, and seek a fair resolution within the Christian community.

They initially agreed. Then they said they would participate only if I first conceded that they had just cause to terminate the franchise. In other words, mediation was acceptable only after I surrendered the dispute the mediation was supposed to resolve. I refused. Eventually, I sued.

Your Signature Should Mean Something

One part of this experience bothered me beyond the money. These were contracts. Psalm 15 describes a righteous person as someone who “keeps an oath even when it hurts.” Ecclesiastes similarly warns against making commitments and then refusing to fulfill them. Those passages concern oaths and vows rather than modern franchise agreements, but the underlying moral principle is difficult to miss: integrity becomes most meaningful when keeping your word becomes inconvenient.

A Christian business owner cannot demand that another believer behave biblically by refusing litigation while simultaneously dismissing biblical obligations concerning honesty, reconciliation, and keeping commitments. Faith cannot become a one-sided shield against accountability.

A Better Christian Framework for Business Disputes

The question isn't simply, “Am I allowed to sue?” Ask instead:

Have I pursued peace before escalation?

If this involves another believer, have I made a genuine effort to resolve it within the Christian community?

Am I pursuing restitution and protection—or revenge?

Is the harm serious enough that allowing it to continue damages employees, customers, partners, family members, intellectual property, or other people entrusted to my care?

Have I kept my own commitments and approached the dispute honestly?

And perhaps most importantly:

Would I still believe this lawsuit was necessary if I weren't angry?

That last question separates justice from vengeance surprisingly well.

Christian business owners should be different. We should be slower to retaliate, quicker to reconcile, willing at times to absorb losses, and unusually serious about keeping our word. But being different does not mean becoming defenseless.

Sometimes grace means letting something go.

Sometimes wisdom means mediation.

And sometimes, after reasonable attempts at reconciliation have failed, justice requires allowing a legitimate authority to determine what is owed.

The Gambit

Before filing your next lawsuit—or refusing to file one because you think Christians “aren't supposed to sue”—remove both anger and religious tradition from the decision. Ask a harder question:

Am I pursuing revenge, or am I responsibly pursuing justice after exhausting a better path?

Those are not the same thing. Scripture shouldn't be used to pretend they are.

When Business Gets Personal

Some of the hardest lessons I learned as an entrepreneur didn't come from marketing campaigns, growth strategies, or successful expansions. They came from conflict—broken agreements, franchise disputes, lawsuits, accusations, and moments when I had to decide what I was willing to fight for and what I was willing to let go.

I share more of those experiences in Lemonade Maker®, including some of the legal battles and business conflicts that helped reshape the way I think about entrepreneurship, adversity, judgment, and resilience. Because building a business isn't only about knowing how to grow when things are going well. It's about learning who you become—and how you make decisions—when things go very wrong.

Read Lemonade Maker® and discover the lessons that are rarely taught until you've lived through them yourself.

Your Greatest Strength May Be What Your Business Has Too Much Of

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:45:54 GMT

Entrepreneurs are usually told to play to their strengths. It sounds sensible. If you are brilliant at design, create. If you understand operations, optimize. If you are a gifted salesperson, sell. Build around what you do exceptionally well and let that advantage compound. There is only one problem: businesses rarely fail because they have too little of the founder’s greatest strength. They often struggle because something entirely different is missing.

A creative entrepreneur can build something imaginative, beautiful, and emotionally compelling that never becomes commercially viable. An operational entrepreneur can build a disciplined, efficient company that works perfectly and gives customers almost no reason to care about it. The assumption worth shattering is subtle: What made me good at my craft will also make me good at building the business around it. Sometimes it will. Often, it won’t.

When Strength Becomes a Blind Spot

Founders naturally see their businesses through the skills they already possess. The designer notices design problems. The marketer notices marketing problems. The operator notices inefficiency. The salesperson sees a conversion problem. That does not make them foolish. Expertise genuinely helps us see things other people miss. But expertise can also narrow the range of solutions we consider.

Organizational-learning researchers describe a related phenomenon as a competency trap : success with familiar capabilities can encourage organizations to keep relying on them, even when different capabilities or approaches may eventually be superior. In other words, getting good at something gives us another reason to keep doing it.

Entrepreneurs can fall into a similar pattern. Creative founders keep creating. Operational founders keep optimizing. Technical founders keep improving the product. Marketing founders keep looking for another campaign. We reinforce the part of the business we already understand while the missing capability remains neglected.

The Two Businesses That Get Stuck

Consider the traditional business that does everything correctly. The service is reliable. Prices are competitive. Operations are efficient. Employees know what to do. And the company is completely forgettable. This is how businesses disappear into what I call the Sea of Sameness™ . Their owners have become so focused on function that they overlook something fundamental: customers are human beings. We respond to emotion, personality, story, atmosphere, beauty, surprise, symbolism, and experience.

Gap demonstrated this beautifully with its famous 1998 Khakis Swing campaign. The company took an ordinary product—khaki pants—and surrounded it with energetic swing dancing, music, movement, attitude, and culture. Gap’s own corporate history still lists the campaign as a defining event of 1998. The pants were functional. The art made them interesting.

But artists often have the opposite problem. They already understand emotion, imagination, presentation, and experience. What they may lack is pricing, marketing, sales, cash-flow discipline, systems, hiring, operations, and scalability. I learned this personally. Before becoming an entrepreneur, I was an artist and performer. I understood lighting, rhythm, presentation, audience experience, and how to make people feel something.

Then I entered business and discovered that creativity alone could not build a company. I had to learn how to monetize what I created. I had to price it, sell it, systemize it, train other people to deliver it, and eventually build an organization capable of producing the experience without depending entirely on me. The artist could imagine the experience. The entrepreneur had to build the machine.

What Great Businesses Actually Need

This changes the question. Instead of asking, “What am I good at?” , the entrepreneur must eventually ask, “What does this business need that I am not naturally inclined to give it?” That distinction matters. A remarkable business needs enough structure to make creativity functional and enough creativity to keep structure from becoming ordinary. Efficiency without imagination creates commodities. Imagination without enterprise creates beautiful chaos. Neither side is inherently superior.

The opportunity exists in the Fusion of Art & Enterprise™ :
Boring businesses need art to make them interesting. Artistic businesses need structure to make them functional.

That is also where business magnetism begins. Price, convenience, features, and efficiency matter, but competitors can often reproduce them. Identity, atmosphere, story, emotional experience, and meaning are considerably harder to duplicate. Creativity can transform function into preference. Structure can transform creativity into enterprise.

Build What You’re Missing

The stronger mental model is not simply play to your strengths . It is:

Use your strengths. Diagnose your gaps. Build the capabilities the business requires.

If your company is brilliant but chaotic, more creativity probably will not save it. It may need discipline, systems, pricing, processes, and commercial structure. If your company is functional but invisible, another efficiency initiative may not be the answer. It may need imagination, storytelling, experience, personality, and art. The rare entrepreneur learns to move between both worlds. If you’re an artist, learn to monetize. If you’re a businessperson, learn to mesmerize.

The Gambit

Look at your company without considering what you personally enjoy doing. Ask yourself one question:

What does this business desperately need that I keep avoiding because it lives outside my natural strengths?

Your next competitive advantage may not come from becoming even better at what you already do. It may come from finally building what has been missing.

FAQ

Why do businesses need both creativity and structure?
Creativity helps a business differentiate, create emotional value, and become memorable. Structure makes that value reliable, profitable, repeatable, and scalable. Strong businesses learn to combine both.

Can an entrepreneur rely too heavily on their strengths?
Yes. Familiar capabilities can become blind spots when founders repeatedly apply what they already know instead of developing capabilities the business actually needs. The goal is not to abandon your strengths, but to recognize what they cannot solve.

Educational Use Notice: This video is owned by Gap, Inc. and is included here for educational and illustrative purposes only under fair-use principles. All rights, trademarks, and copyrights remain the property of their respective owners.

AI Content Slop: Why Original Human Expertise Matters More

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:23:29 GMT

For years, business owners were handed a simple content-marketing rule: publish more. Post more often. Feed the algorithm. Be everywhere. Build a content machine. The logic was reasonable. When content was expensive to produce, the companies willing to create more of it often gained more opportunities to be discovered. Then generative AI changed the economics almost overnight. A business can now produce articles, captions, images, emails, videos, and scripts faster than its audience could ever consume them.

That creates a problem with the old rule. If everyone can manufacture content at nearly unlimited volume, volume itself stops being much of an advantage. The assumption worth shattering is this: more content creates more authority. It can. But only when the content contains something worth paying attention to.

When Output Became the Goal

The content-machine mindset survived because it gave entrepreneurs something wonderfully measurable. You could count posts, articles, emails, videos, impressions, and publishing frequency. More activity felt like more marketing. That is where the distortion enters. We began confusing the measurable activity with the actual objective.

The purpose of content was never to produce content. It was to earn attention, communicate expertise, create trust, answer questions, and help the right people understand why a business matters. Publishing was merely the delivery mechanism. AI made the mistake easier to scale. If one article is good, ten must be better. If three social posts create visibility, thirty should create more. The machine can keep producing, so we keep feeding it.

The result is what people increasingly call AI content slop : mass-produced material with little original experience, judgment, reporting, analysis, or perspective. It may be grammatically clean and visually polished. It is also often interchangeable. Remove the logo and ask a brutal question: Could one of your competitors have published exactly the same thing? If the answer is yes, the problem is not that AI touched it. The problem is that nothing distinctly yours did.

What the Platforms Are Actually Telling Us

It is tempting to simplify the shift into another rule: platforms hate AI content. That is not what the evidence says.

Google says its systems are designed to reward helpful, reliable, people-first content, regardless of whether AI assisted in creating it. But Google also warns that generating large numbers of pages without adding value can violate its scaled-content spam policies. Its 2026 guidance for generative search goes further, recommending unique, “non-commodity” content grounded in original viewpoints and firsthand experience.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. Meta has said Facebook accounts that flood feeds with spammy content or try to game distribution can lose reach and monetization. YouTube now describes mass-produced or repetitive material as “inauthentic content” for monetization purposes, while explicitly allowing AI-assisted work that remains original and valuable.

The distinction matters. The emerging divide is not human content versus AI content. It is commodity content versus meaningful content. That is a much better way to think about what is happening.

Scarcity Moved Somewhere Else

AI has made production abundant. But it has not made experience abundant. A founder who has spent twenty years inside an industry still possesses things that cannot simply be generated from a prompt: customer stories, mistakes, pattern recognition, unpopular opinions, case histories, judgment calls, predictions, original frameworks, and lessons earned through consequences. Those are becoming more valuable precisely because generic production is becoming cheaper.

This reverses the old content equation. The scarce resource is no longer the ability to turn words into a blog post or footage into a video. The scarce resource is having something original to say. Video, podcasts, interviews, and thoughtful long-form writing can make that expertise particularly visible because they reveal how someone thinks. For founders who are not natural performers, conversation is especially useful. Ask someone to “create content” and they may freeze. Ask the right question about an industry they have spent twenty years mastering, and the stories, opinions, patterns, and lessons often appear naturally.

The Rewire: Don’t Use AI to Replace the Human

The stronger model is not “stop using AI.” That would throw away an extraordinary tool. Use AI for research assistance, organization, editing, transcription, repurposing, ideation, formatting, and distribution. Let it reduce the cost of turning one strong idea into many useful formats. But reverse the order of operations.

Old wiring: Generate content → publish everywhere → hope authority appears.

New wiring: Capture real expertise → create something useful → use AI to multiply it → build authority over time.

Consistency still matters, but for a different reason. Fifty interchangeable posts are noise. Fifty useful pieces built around distinctive knowledge begin to form an authority library . One strong conversation can become a YouTube video, podcast episode, article, short clips, email, FAQ, social posts, and searchable transcript. In that model, AI is not manufacturing expertise. It is distributing intellectual capital. That is the opportunity hidden inside the AI slop problem.

The Gambit

Look at your last ten pieces of content and remove your company name, logo, and product references. Could a competent competitor publish them without changing anything? If so, do not ask how to produce the next ten faster. Ask what you know, believe, have experienced, or can explain that your competitors cannot easily copy. That is where your next content strategy begins.

For businesses with valuable expertise trapped inside the founder’s head, that is also the idea behind Limelight by Lemonade Maker® : use interview-driven conversations to uncover the stories, arguments, knowledge, and perspective already inside the business, then turn them into a growing media library. The new content advantage is not becoming a more efficient slop machine. It is becoming more unmistakably worth finding.

FAQs

Does Google penalize AI-generated content?

Not simply because AI was used. Google says it focuses on content quality and usefulness rather than the production method. However, using AI or other automation to mass-produce pages without adding meaningful value can violate its scaled-content spam policies.

Should businesses stop using AI to create content?

No. The stronger approach is to use AI to amplify genuine expertise rather than manufacture generic expertise. AI can help organize, edit, repurpose, research, transcribe, and distribute original ideas far more efficiently.

What makes content “non-commodity”?

Content becomes harder to commoditize when it contains something competitors or AI systems cannot easily reproduce: firsthand experience, original research, proprietary frameworks, customer stories, distinctive judgment, useful analysis, strong opinions, or knowledge earned through real-world experience.

Action Bias in Entrepreneurship: When Activity Is Mistaken for Progress

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:15:18 GMT

A strange thing happens when a business begins to struggle: the entrepreneur often becomes busier. More meetings appear on the calendar. More content gets created. Another campaign launches. The website gets revised. New offers are added. The days become fuller, the hours longer, and the entrepreneur can point to an impressive amount of work. Yet the business itself may not be getting any better. That is where a reasonable entrepreneurial belief becomes dangerous: If the business is not improving, I must not be doing enough.

Why Doing More Feels Like the Responsible Answer

Entrepreneurship trains us to respect action. Founders are praised for moving quickly, taking initiative, staying persistent, and refusing to wait for something to happen. In many situations, that instinct is valuable. Businesses do not grow because someone thought beautifully about them. The distortion begins when action becomes the automatic response to uncertainty.

Researchers use action bias to describe situations in which people favor doing something over doing nothing, particularly when action feels expected or easier to defend. It is not a universal law, and not every burst of activity is irrational. For entrepreneurs, the more useful question is: Am I acting because this is the best move, or because movement feels better than not knowing?

Activity offers psychological rewards before it produces any business result. It restores a sense of control. It gives us evidence that we are trying. It protects our identity as hardworking entrepreneurs. And because business culture often admires visible hustle, being busy can look more responsible than admitting, “I don’t yet know what the problem is.” That is what makes action bias so difficult to see from the inside. It can feel exactly like discipline.

The Business May Not Need More of You

Suppose sales have stalled. The instinctive prescription is often more marketing: run more ads, post more frequently, rebuild the landing page, attend more events, launch another offer, or hire an agency. Any one of those actions could be correct. But stalled sales do not prove that marketing is the problem.

The actual constraint could be weak positioning, an offer customers do not value enough, poor sales conversion, bad pricing, low retention, operational friction, weak differentiation, or a business model that cannot produce the economics you expected. More marketing poured into those problems may simply amplify what is already broken.

Strip away the anxiety, the entrepreneurial folklore, and the need to look productive, and the reality becomes much cleaner: you know the result is insufficient; you do not yet know why. That gap between result and cause is where entrepreneurs often prescribe before they diagnose.

Motion and Progress Are Not the Same Thing

The mistake is not action. The mistake is using action as proof of progress. A full calendar measures activity. So does a large task list, fifty social posts, ten networking events, or a week of twelve-hour days. None of those measures tells you whether the business became healthier. Progress requires a meaningful change in the system: stronger demand, better conversion, healthier margins, clearer positioning, higher retention, improved cash flow, more reliable operations, or some other movement toward the outcome you actually need.

A stronger mental model is simple:

Old wiring: Poor results → Do more.

New wiring: Poor results → Diagnose the constraint → Choose the action most likely to change it → Measure what happened.

This is not an argument for hesitation. Entrepreneurship still rewards decisive people. The rewire is diagnosis before acceleration .

Sometimes the diagnosis will tell you to move faster. Sometimes it will tell you to stop a project, kill an offer, change the positioning, repair the economics, or spend three days thinking instead of three weeks producing. Strategic stillness is not the opposite of action. Used correctly, it is what makes action intelligent.

The Gambit

The next time you feel the urge to add another campaign, meeting, project, tool, offer, or twelve-hour day because the business is not moving fast enough, ask one question first:

What evidence tells me that more activity will solve the problem I actually have?

If you cannot answer it, do not immediately do more. Diagnose more. The most dangerous kind of hard work is disciplined, exhausting, admirable effort applied to the wrong problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is action bias in entrepreneurship?
It is the tendency to respond to uncertainty or poor results by increasing activity before determining whether that activity addresses the real constraint.

Is taking action bad for entrepreneurs?
No. Action is essential. The problem begins when action substitutes for diagnosis or when visible effort is mistaken for evidence that the business is improving.

How can I tell activity from progress?
Connect important work to a defined business outcome. If the work does not improve something meaningful—such as demand, conversion, margin, retention, cash flow, or operational reliability—it may be motion rather than progress.

Action Bias Is Only the First Lie

Action bias is Lie #1 in 7 Lies Keeping Brilliant Entrepreneurs Trapped . The larger pattern is not that entrepreneurs fail because they are lazy or unintelligent. It is that capable people can operate from assumptions that feel responsible precisely because those assumptions have never been examined. If this felt familiar, the full 7 Lies framework explores six more distortions that can quietly shape how entrepreneurs think, decide, market, lead, and grow.

Watch: 7 Lies Keeping Brilliant Entrepreneurs Trapped →

Think You’re Trapped in a Franchise Agreement? Start Here

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:05:29 GMT

You bought a franchise because it was supposed to reduce uncertainty. There was a proven model, established brand, training, support, marketing, and a system someone else had already figured out.

Then the business started losing money.

Now you may be burning through savings, questioning whether the model works, and staring at a franchise agreement that suddenly feels less like protection and more like a trap. The question becomes urgent: How do I get out of my franchise agreement?

The first thing to understand is that this is not simply a legal question. It is also a strategic one.

I have seen franchising from both sides. I built an eight-figure franchise system, sold more than twenty franchise territories, and later experienced franchise litigation myself. One lesson from that experience is especially important: when fear enters the room, entrepreneurs tend to confuse the worst possible outcome with the most likely one. This article is not legal advice. Before terminating, breaching, transferring, or negotiating a franchise agreement, speak with an experienced franchise attorney.

The Assumption: “I Signed It, So I’m Trapped”

A struggling franchisee often sees only two choices: keep operating and losing money, or walk away and get sued. That makes the contract feel absolute. The franchise agreement matters enormously, of course. It may contain obligations involving royalties, termination, transfers, personal guarantees, dispute resolution, non-competes, and post-termination requirements. But the existence of an obligation does not tell you, by itself, how the situation will ultimately be resolved.

The dangerous mental move is turning the contract into a prophecy. Fear does something else too. Once you have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, years of work, and perhaps much of your savings, walking away can feel like admitting that everything was wasted. Psychologists call this the sunk cost effect : people become more likely to continue an endeavor because of resources already invested, even though those resources cannot be recovered. That can keep a franchisee funding yesterday’s decision instead of evaluating tomorrow’s options.

Start With What the Documents Actually Say

Before thinking about threats, leverage, or lawsuits, establish reality. Start with Item 17 of your Franchise Disclosure Document and the corresponding sections of your franchise agreement. Under the FTC Franchise Rule, Item 17 summarizes important provisions involving termination by the franchisee, termination by the franchisor, transfers, post-termination obligations, non-competes, arbitration, choice of forum, and choice of law.

In other words, do not begin with:

“How bad could this get?”

Begin with:

“What did I actually agree to?”

Then have qualified counsel determine how the agreement interacts with applicable law. Franchise law is not identical everywhere. State franchise relationship laws can affect issues such as termination and nonrenewal, which is one reason generic internet advice can be dangerous.

Then Examine the Franchise You Were Sold

Once you understand the agreement, go back to the Franchise Disclosure Document. If the franchisor made a Financial Performance Representation, examine Item 19 . The FTC requires financial performance claims included there to have a reasonable factual basis and supporting information.

Compare the assumptions and disclosed results with what actually occurred in your business. Were the economics materially different from what you understood? Were startup costs or working-capital needs dramatically greater? Were sales or profitability expectations based on circumstances unlike yours? Those differences do not automatically create a legal claim. They create questions worth examining with counsel.

Next, study Item 20 . It reports changes within the franchise system, including outlets that were transferred, terminated, not renewed, reacquired, or ceased operating. It also provides contact information for current and certain former franchisees. The FTC specifically encourages prospective franchisees to speak with them because those conversations can reveal information that marketing materials cannot. If fifteen owners encountered the same problem you did, that is different from discovering that you are the only one. Patterns change diagnosis.

A Demand Letter Is Information, Not Destiny

If a dispute has already begun, another distortion can appear. A lawyer sends an aggressive letter demanding royalties, damages, legal fees, or compliance. The franchisee reads it as though a judge has already ruled. But a demand letter represents one party’s position. It may identify very real contractual exposure. It deserves serious attention. But the existence of a demand does not determine how a court or arbitrator would ultimately interpret the facts, the contract, available defenses, damages, or applicable law. That distinction matters psychologically because panic produces bad strategy.

The Rewire: Diagnose the Exit Before Choosing It

The old mental model looks like this:

Bad franchise → Contract → Trapped

A stronger model is:

Bad franchise → Diagnose the business → Understand the agreement → Examine the system → Evaluate legal exposure → Compare exit options

Depending on the circumstances, those options might include improving the existing business, selling or transferring the franchise, negotiating a mutual termination, reaching a settlement, completing the term and declining renewal, or pursuing rights or defenses identified by counsel. The goal is not necessarily to “beat” the franchisor. The goal is to determine which path leaves you in the strongest economic position from this point forward. That is a very different question.

The Gambit

Before asking, “How do I get out of my franchise agreement?” , ask:

“If I ignored everything I have already invested, what decision would make the most sense from today forward?”

Then take your agreement, FDD, financial statements, communications, and actual operating results to professionals capable of helping you answer it.

You may ultimately decide to stay.

You may decide to negotiate.

You may decide to leave.

But make that decision from reality—not from fear.

A Strategic Look Before the Legal Move

A franchise attorney should advise you on your legal rights and exposure. But if you are still trying to determine whether the underlying business can be repaired, whether the model itself is broken, or whether leaving is economically smarter than staying, a Lemonade Maker® CEO Diagnostic can help you examine the strategic side of that decision. Before deciding how to escape the business, make sure you understand exactly what you are escaping from—and what you want to build next.

FAQ

Can I just walk away from my franchise agreement?

Walking away may create contractual, financial, and legal consequences. Review the franchise agreement, FDD Item 17, applicable law, and your specific circumstances with an experienced franchise attorney before taking action.

Can a franchise agreement be negotiated or terminated early?

Sometimes. The agreement may provide specific termination or transfer rights, and parties may also choose to negotiate an exit or settlement. Whether that is realistic depends on the contract, facts, economics, and applicable law.

What part of the FDD should I review if I want to leave?

Start with Item 17, which summarizes termination, transfer, post-termination obligations, dispute resolution, and related provisions. Items 19 and 20 may then help you evaluate what was represented financially and what has happened elsewhere in the franchise system.

5 Ways Marketing Agencies Bleed Your Business Dry (And How to Avoid Getting Scammed)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:04:22 GMT

One of the most expensive assumptions entrepreneurs make is surprisingly simple:

They know marketing, so they must know how to grow my business.

Those are not the same thing. In my experience working with entrepreneurs, much of the marketing industry looks less like experienced business operators and more like a highly polished gig economy. Someone learns SEO, Facebook ads, website development, funnels, automation, or cold email and suddenly becomes a “growth strategist.”

The skill may be real. The authority often is not. Many have never built a meaningful business outside the service they are currently selling. Yet overwhelmed entrepreneurs hand them thousands of dollars—and sometimes control of an essential part of their company—because technical knowledge gets mistaken for business wisdom. That is where the bleeding starts.

1. They Diagnose Your Business With Whatever They Sell

There is an old idea in psychology known as Maslow’s Hammer : when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail. Marketing is full of hammers. Ask an SEO agency why leads are down and you may need SEO. Ask a funnel builder and you need a funnel. Ask an automation consultant and you need automation. Ask a web designer and suddenly the website is the problem.

Sometimes they are right. The problem is that their financial incentive and their diagnosis point in exactly the same direction. That is incentive bias . They make money when the problem happens to require the thing they sell. The question entrepreneurs should ask is not, “Can this person perform the service?” Ask: “What evidence says this is the problem I should solve?”

2. SEO Has Become an Extremely Profitable Fog Machine

SEO may be the best example because most entrepreneurs cannot tell what they are buying. I regularly meet business owners paying four-figure monthly retainers who cannot explain what the agency actually does. One client was paying about $1,200 every month because, in his words, “They handle my SEO.” That was essentially the entire explanation.

Another was paying roughly $2,500 per month for one blog article . The article was not remarkable. Today, AI can produce the raw material for that kind of generic article in seconds. Other entrepreneurs are shown ranking reports filled with keywords they do not understand. They are told they are “ranking” for phrases with almost no meaningful search volume or commercial value. Some walk away believing they somehow bought or own keywords.

Organic Google listings are not purchased keywords. Google describes organic search results as free listings, while keywords in Google Ads are targeting mechanisms for paid advertising. Google also explicitly warns businesses that nobody can guarantee a #1 organic ranking and that an SEO provider should be willing to explain exactly what it is doing. And the content game is changing quickly. Google now specifically encourages unique, useful, non-commodity content and warns against producing large amounts of low-value material primarily to manipulate search visibility.

So what exactly are you paying thousands every month to receive?

You should know.

3. They Sell Dependency Along With the Website

I recently worked with an entrepreneur who had been sold a roughly $6,000 basic website , followed by approximately $350 per month in hosting and related fees . Nothing about the site justified that level of dependency. He cancelled the arrangement. Instead, I showed him how to understand and manage the system himself for $79 per month. The biggest win was not saving money on the website. He no longer needed the agency. That matters.

Outsourcing should buy leverage, not ignorance. If terminating a vendor means you suddenly lose the ability to understand, modify, or operate an important part of your business, you did not simply purchase a service. You purchased dependency.

4. They Build Infrastructure for Businesses That Don’t Need It

CRMs. Funnels. Lead scoring. Automated nurture campaigns. Elaborate dashboards. AI workflows. They look impressive during demos. But I have watched entrepreneurs install enterprise-level marketing infrastructure when they barely have enough leads to require a spreadsheet.

That reverses the correct order. Volume creates the need for systems. Systems do not create the need for volume.

My first company used simple tools until the business became large enough that simple tools stopped working. Only then did sophisticated systems make economic sense. Complexity should be earned.

5. The Expert’s Own Business Often Tells a Different Story

One of my favorite questions when evaluating a marketing expert is:

“Show me how this works in your own business.”

I once encountered someone on Upwork selling cold-email setup for approximately $5,000 , followed by roughly $3,000 per month to manage it. So I asked for his numbers. His own cold-email campaign was producing a response rate well below 1%. Then another question became unavoidable:

If this system is so effective that businesses should pay thousands every month for it, why did I find you prospecting for clients on Upwork instead of using your supposedly superior system?

That does not automatically prove his service had no value. But it absolutely changes the burden of proof. Marketing experts should be willing to show evidence.

The Real Problem Is False Authority

The lesson is not that nobody should hire a marketing professional. It is that technical expertise does not automatically create strategic authority .

A person can be brilliant at SEO and still be completely unqualified to determine whether SEO is what your business needs.

A talented web designer can build a beautiful website without understanding why customers are not buying.

A funnel expert can optimize the conversion process for an offer nobody wants.

The old wiring is:

Poor results → Find an expert → Buy their solution

The better rewire is:

Poor results → Diagnose the constraint → Determine the right intervention → Buy expertise only where needed → Maintain enough knowledge to stay in control

Marketing should serve the business.

The business should never become a revenue stream designed to support your marketing vendors.

The Gambit

Before hiring your next agency, consultant, or marketing expert, ask one uncomfortable question:

“If I were not allowed to buy the service you sell, what would you tell me is actually wrong with my business?”

Then listen carefully.

That answer may tell you more about their expertise than any portfolio, certification, dashboard, or pitch deck ever will.

At Lemonade Maker® , this is one reason we begin with the CEO Diagnostic . Diagnose before you prescribe—especially when the person writing the prescription also happens to sell the medicine.

FAQ

What are the biggest marketing agency red flags?

Selling before diagnosing, unexplained recurring fees, confusing reports, meaningless metrics, unnecessary technology, refusal to show results, and making the entrepreneur dependent on the agency.

Is SEO a scam?

SEO itself is legitimate. The problem is opaque SEO retainers where business owners cannot identify the work being performed, the search demand being targeted, or the commercial result being created.

Should small businesses hire marketing agencies?

Sometimes. But hire specialists for clearly diagnosed problems rather than giving a marketing vendor broad authority over the business simply because they understand a technical discipline.

3 Reasons Most Businesses Never Reach $1 Million

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:39:55 GMT

Most entrepreneurs don’t fail because they’re lazy. In fact, the opposite is usually true. They work incredibly hard. They wake up early, stay up late, wear too many hats, and carry enormous pressure. They sacrifice time, sleep, peace, and often their health trying to make the business work. And yet many still stay stuck. Revenue goes up and down. Marketing feels inconsistent. Growth stalls. Stress rises.

Eventually, they start asking themselves a painful question: What am I missing?

Most assume the answer is another strategy. Another course. Another expert. Another marketing tactic. Another tool. But what if the real problem isn’t strategy? What if the real problem is something far more dangerous? What if your thinking has become distorted?

This is the dark side of entrepreneurship that almost nobody talks about. When entrepreneurs operate under constant pressure, stress starts affecting judgment. You become more reactive, more emotional, and more vulnerable to bad advice and false assumptions.

This is what I call Mad Hatter Syndrome™ .

Like the original hat makers poisoned by mercury, entrepreneurs today are often poisoned by something invisible: noise, fear, urgency, overwhelm, and false beliefs. And once your thinking becomes distorted, you can work incredibly hard while moving in the wrong direction. Here are three of the biggest distortions keeping businesses stuck below the million-dollar mark.

1. You Built a Business That Can’t Function Without You

This is one of the most common traps in entrepreneurship. You started the business because you had a valuable skill. Maybe you’re great at consulting, design, law, fitness, real estate, or some other service. At first, being the business works just fine. But growth changes the game.

Suddenly you’re no longer just delivering the service. Now you’re responsible for marketing, sales, operations, customer service, hiring, leadership, strategy, and finances—all at the same time. Everything flows back to you. Every important decision needs your input. Every problem lands on your desk. Every dollar depends on your effort. This creates a dangerous illusion. You tell yourself you own a business, but often you don’t. You own a job with overhead. And in many cases, it’s an exhausting one.

This is where distortion kicks in. Many entrepreneurs mistake busyness for scale . They assume that because they’re constantly busy, the business must be growing. Not necessarily. You can be overwhelmed and still structurally broken. A business that depends entirely on the owner isn’t scalable. It’s fragile. Growth should create leverage, but for many entrepreneurs, growth creates more chaos instead. More customers. More problems. More pressure. More dependency. That isn’t freedom. That’s a trap.

The hard truth is simple: if the business cannot function without you, you haven’t built a real company yet.

You’ve built dependency.

2. You Think Random Marketing Activity Is a Marketing System

This is one of the biggest lies entrepreneurs believe. They assume they have marketing because they’re doing marketing-related activities. They have a website, social media accounts, some ads, occasional emails, maybe even SEO. So they assume marketing is handled. But activity is not the same as architecture. This is where many businesses quietly break. They expect one tactic to do the work of an entire system. They hope one ad, one funnel, one website redesign, or one AI tool will somehow fix everything.

That’s tactic addiction. And it usually leads to disappointment. Because marketing isn’t one thing. It’s a machine.

Think of a watch. One gear by itself does nothing. But when every gear connects properly, the system works beautifully. Marketing works the same way. Each component has a specific job.

Your ad has a job.

Your website has a job.

Your messaging has a job.

Your sales process has a job.

When those parts don’t connect, the machine breaks. This is where entrepreneurs get distorted. They obsess over traffic while ignoring conversion. They obsess over leads while ignoring messaging. They obsess over tactics while ignoring customer psychology. They keep asking, How do I get more attention?

But often the better question is: Why aren’t people choosing us?

Those are very different questions. One chases noise. The other diagnoses reality. Rare entrepreneurs understand something average entrepreneurs miss: marketing isn’t random activity. It’s intentional progression. When the sequence is broken, growth becomes unpredictable.

3. You Blend Into the Sea of Sameness

Even businesses with decent structure and decent marketing still hit another major ceiling. They look like everyone else. Same promises. Same language. Same offers. Same customer experience. Over time, they become commodities. And when customers don’t see meaningful differences between companies, they default to three things: price, convenience, and familiarity. That’s dangerous. Because once customers stop seeing distinction, your value becomes harder to defend.

This is one of the biggest distortions in modern business. Many entrepreneurs think being different automatically creates competitive advantage. It doesn’t. Different alone means nothing.

Weird is different.

Bad is different.

Confusing is different.

Customers don’t reward difference.

They reward value.

Real competitive advantage happens when you create meaningful value competitors fail to create. Better communication. Better onboarding. Better trust. Better customer experience. Better problem-solving. Something customers actually care about. This is where the Sea of Sameness™ becomes deadly. Most businesses compete on surface-level things like price, features, and tactics. The strongest businesses compete on something deeper.

They become more valuable.

More memorable.

More magnetic.

Customers compare logically, but they choose emotionally. That’s why some businesses become impossible to ignore. They don’t just function well—they feel different. That’s where preference is created. That’s where magnetism is created. That’s where competitive edge is created.

Final Thoughts

Most businesses don’t stay small because the owner lacks ambition or work ethic. They stay small because distorted thinking keeps them focused on the wrong problems. They work harder inside broken systems. They chase tactics instead of diagnosis. They blend into crowded markets while wondering why growth feels so difficult. This is the danger of Mad Hatter Syndrome™ .

The scariest part is that from the inside, it feels normal. It feels like hard work. It feels like progress. It feels like you’re doing everything right. But distorted thinking can make smart entrepreneurs build fragile businesses. That’s why the first breakthrough usually isn’t better tactics. It’s better perception. Because before you can build differently, you must learn to see differently.

Why “Different, Not Better” Is Misleading Advice

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:47:36 GMT

Why “Be Different, Not Better” Is Misleading Advice

One of the most repeated pieces of business advice today sounds smart on the surface:

“You don’t need to be better. You just need to be different.”

A lot of entrepreneurs hear that and immediately feel relieved. Good. I don’t need to outperform everyone. I just need to stand out.

But this idea often becomes a dangerous distortion. Because once that belief takes hold, entrepreneurs start chasing uniqueness instead of value. They obsess over branding, messaging, design, aesthetics, and attention. They become focused on looking different.

And that’s where the distortion begins.

The Mad Hatter Distortion

Inside Mad Hatter Syndrome , this is what happens: the entrepreneur becomes convinced that standing out automatically creates demand.

It doesn’t. Just because something is different doesn’t mean customers care.

Different can be weird. Different can be confusing. Different can even make things worse. This is one of the most common psychological traps I see. I call it False Differentiation . The entrepreneur confuses novelty with value. They assume customers are looking for originality. Usually, customers are looking for something much simpler: trust, clarity, confidence, results, and ease. Customers do not wake up asking, “Who has the most unique brand?”

They wake up asking:

Who can solve my problem?

That’s a massive difference. And if you miss that, your business can drift into illusion. You may feel innovative while actually becoming less relevant. That is the dark mirror. From the inside, it feels like progress. From the outside, customers remain unconvinced.

The Shattering

This is where the distortion must break. Different is not the goal. Better isn’t even the full goal either. The real goal is becoming the clear choice . That requires something deeper than clever branding. It requires accurate diagnosis. Rare entrepreneurs understand something average entrepreneurs often miss:

Different and better are not strategies. They are outcomes of meaningful innovation.

That changes everything. Instead of asking, “How do I look different?” the better question becomes:

What meaningful problem am I solving that others keep ignoring?

That question pulls you back into reality. And reality is where rare advantage is built.

The Light Side: Lemonade Maker

This is where Lemonade Maker begins. Mad Hatter reveals the lie. Lemonade Maker teaches the rewire. Most entrepreneurs assume innovation means inventing something revolutionary. It usually doesn’t. Real innovation is often far less glamorous. It looks like improving communication, reducing friction, improving customer experience, making decisions easier, and solving overlooked problems.

In other words, innovation is often just valuable problem-solving . That’s why so many entrepreneurs miss it. They are looking for dramatic breakthroughs while rare entrepreneurs quietly build competitive edge through thoughtful improvements customers can actually feel. That is where real differentiation comes from.

Not gimmicks.

Not noise.

Not forced uniqueness.

Real competitive advantage emerges when meaningful value becomes difficult to replicate.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

We are now entering the AI era, and this changes the game. AI is rapidly commoditizing average skills: content creation, research, strategy generation, and basic execution. Average is becoming cheaper. Average is becoming easier to replace. That means the future advantage belongs to entrepreneurs with rare psychology and rare skills .

The entrepreneurs who win tomorrow will not simply know more.

They will think better.

They will see what others miss.

They will recognize opportunities hidden inside chaos, confusion, and market noise. That is what creates real advantage.

The Rare Entrepreneur

Rare entrepreneurs develop three abilities that average entrepreneurs struggle to build. They see what others miss by identifying hidden opportunities competitors overlook. They create unfair advantage by solving meaningful problems others ignore. They become irreplaceable by building something customers strongly prefer. This is the opposite of false differentiation. This is strategic differentiation.

One is driven by ego.

The other is driven by value.

One asks:

How can I appear unique?

The other asks:

How can I become meaningfully valuable?

That distinction separates average from rare.

Final Rewire

The strongest businesses do not obsess over looking different. They obsess over creating meaningful value. And when they do that consistently, something interesting happens. They naturally become different. That’s the irony. The entrepreneurs trying hardest to look unique often miss what actually creates uniqueness.

Real differentiation is rarely manufactured. It is earned.

Through insight.

Through innovation.

Through better problem-solving.

Through rare thinking.

That is the rewire.

Because in a world where average is becoming a commodity…

Rare becomes priceless.

The AI Advice Trap: Better Answers to the Wrong Business Problem

Tue, 05 May 2026 18:32:52 GMT

AI may be one of the most useful business tools ever created. It can brainstorm offers, critique a landing page, suggest marketing ideas, write emails, analyze competitors, explain financial concepts, generate sales strategies, and give you twenty ideas before your coffee gets cold.

But there is a dangerous assumption hiding underneath all that usefulness:

If AI gives me a good answer, I must be getting closer to solving my problem.

Not necessarily. Because AI can give you an excellent answer to a question you never should have been asking in the first place. And for entrepreneurs, that may be the bigger danger.

When the Question Already Contains the Mistake

Imagine your business isn't generating enough sales.

You open AI and ask:

“How can I improve my Facebook ads?”

Within seconds, you have suggestions for new hooks, better targeting, stronger calls to action, creative testing, retargeting campaigns, landing-page improvements, and fifteen new ad concepts. The advice may be perfectly reasonable. But what if your Facebook ads aren't the problem?

Maybe customers don't understand the offer. Maybe your pricing doesn't make sense. Maybe your business looks identical to every competitor. Maybe leads are coming in but your sales process is weak. Maybe customers buy once and never come back. Maybe the economics of the business simply don't support the advertising costs required to acquire customers.

AI can help you optimize the thing you asked it to optimize. That doesn't mean you chose the right thing.

The Streetlight Effect Comes to AI

There is a psychological bias known as the Streetlight Effect . The classic story involves someone looking for lost keys underneath a streetlight—not because the keys were lost there, but because that is where the light makes searching easier. The term is used more broadly to describe our tendency to search where information is easiest to examine rather than where the answer is most likely to exist.

Entrepreneurs do this constantly.

Marketing is visible, so they diagnose a marketing problem.

Sales are down, so they diagnose a sales problem.

Traffic is low, so they diagnose a traffic problem.

Competitors are growing, so they diagnose a competitive problem.

Then they bring that diagnosis to AI.

And suddenly the streetlight gets much brighter.

Instead of five possible solutions to the wrong problem, you now have fifty. That can actually make the distortion stronger because activity feels like progress. You are testing prompts, rewriting copy, generating strategies, researching funnels, producing content, and making changes. You are doing a tremendous amount of work. You may simply be digging in the wrong place.

AI Usually Starts With the World You Give It

There is another problem. When you ask, “How do I improve my marketing?” you have already told AI something important: marketing is the problem. The question contains a diagnosis. Unless that assumption gets challenged, the conversation can proceed entirely inside it.

Research into language-model sycophancy—the tendency of models to become overly agreeable or reflect a user's viewpoint—makes this worth taking seriously. A 2026 CHI study found that additional interaction context can increase some forms of sycophancy, while separate research published in Nature found that optimizing models toward greater warmth can also increase sycophantic behavior under some conditions.

That doesn't mean AI will always agree with you. It doesn't. It means you shouldn't confuse a confident, intelligent-sounding conversation with an independent diagnosis of your business. AI knows what you tell it. Your business contains thousands of things you haven't told it. And perhaps most importantly, you decide which problem enters the prompt. If your perception is distorted before the conversation begins, AI can inherit the distortion.

Generic Advice Can Still Be Good Advice

There is nothing inherently wrong with mainstream business advice. Improve your offer. Know your customer. Test your advertising. Create good content. Follow up with leads. Watch cash flow. Differentiate yourself. Measure results.

Most of that is sensible. The problem is relevance. A doctor could give you a list of perfectly legitimate medications. That would not tell you which one you need. Business advice works the same way. The best strategy isn't merely a strategy that works. It is the strategy that addresses the constraint currently preventing your business from moving forward. That requires diagnosis before prescription.

This Is Where Human Strategy Still Matters

This is one of the reasons we built Lemonade Maker® Strategies differently. Entrepreneurs often arrive believing they already know their problem.

“I need marketing.”

“I need more leads.”

“I need social media.”

“I need SEO.”

“I need a better funnel.”

Maybe.

But before jumping to the solution, we want to understand the business.

What are you selling? Why would someone choose it? Where are customers getting stuck? What have you already tried? What are the economics? What is happening competitively? What assumptions are you making? What evidence actually supports your diagnosis?

Sometimes the entrepreneur needs marketing.

Sometimes the entrepreneur needs a different offer.

Sometimes the problem is positioning, pricing, sales, retention, operations, customer value, or the business model itself.

And sometimes the most valuable strategic advice is telling an entrepreneur:

Stop fixing that. That isn't your problem.

AI can be extraordinarily useful once the problem is clearer. It can accelerate research, generate alternatives, challenge an idea, organize information, simulate objections, and help you think.

But the stronger mental model is not:

Problem → Ask AI → Get solution

It is:

Poor result → Diagnose the real constraint → Ask better questions → Use AI and expertise to explore solutions → Test against reality

AI belongs in the process.

It should not become the process.

The Gambit

The next time you are about to ask AI how to solve a business problem, don't begin with:

“How do I fix this?”

Ask something more dangerous:

“What if I'm wrong about what the problem is?”

Then go looking somewhere other than underneath the streetlight.

Why Entrepreneurs Underestimate How Hard Building a Business Really Is

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 13:45:44 GMT

Recently, a new member was explaining what his business needed.

“I just gotta get the word out.”

I immediately replied, “That’s like saying, ‘I just have to climb Mount Everest.’”

Technically, both statements are true. If enough people hear about your business, some of them may become customers. And if you keep moving upward on Mount Everest, eventually you may reach the summit. The problem is the word just .

Entrepreneurs use it to compress enormously complicated problems into deceptively simple sentences. I just need more customers. I just need to hire somebody. I just need to scale. I just need to get organized. I just need to make enough money so my kids can take over someday. The sentence sounds simple. The system underneath it usually isn't.

Your Brain Loves Turning Mountains Into Hills

Psychologists have several ways of describing pieces of this problem, including the planning fallacy and complexity neglect. In plain English, we tend to underestimate how difficult something will be when we cannot see all the moving parts yet. That makes entrepreneurship particularly dangerous territory.

From the outside, a successful business can look remarkably simple. Someone sells something people want, collects money, hires employees and grows. Social media makes the illusion even stronger because we usually encounter successful entrepreneurs after the difficult machinery has already been built.

We see the summit.

We don't see the expedition.

Some successful business owners didn't even make the original climb. They inherited established companies. Others started with investors, existing audiences, valuable relationships, family resources or unusually favorable timing. None of that invalidates their success, but it does mean their path may have very little resemblance to yours.

When you compare your messy climb with someone else's apparent ease, you can start believing you're doing something wrong.

Sometimes you're simply climbing a different mountain.

“Getting the Word Out” Is a Massive Undertaking

Marketing is probably one of the most common examples of entrepreneurial oversimplification.

“I just gotta get the word out.”

Okay. How?

People have to discover you. The right people have to discover you. They need to understand what you do, recognize why it matters, believe your claims, distinguish you from alternatives, remember you when they need you, and eventually feel enough confidence to buy.

That's not one task called “getting the word out.” That's a system.

Advertising might be part of it. So might referrals, search, social media, email, partnerships, content, events, publicity, outbound sales or dozens of other strategies. Those strategies have to work together while you develop positioning, messaging, offers, pricing, sales processes and customer experiences that actually convert attention into revenue. You can absolutely get the word out. Just don't confuse a four-word sentence with a four-step project.

“I'm Building This for My Kids”

Legacy is another beautiful idea that entrepreneurs can accidentally oversimplify. A founder works brutally hard and thinks, Someday, my children will have all of this. But what exactly is “all of this”?

If the company depends heavily on you, produces modest profits, requires constant firefighting and consumes most of your life, you may not be building an asset for your children. You may be building them a job they don't want.

And they're watching.

You may see your sacrifice as building their future. They may see an exhausted parent who is always working, constantly worried about money and permanently tethered to the company. From their perspective, entrepreneurship doesn't look like freedom. It looks like something to escape.

I've also worked with entrepreneurs who own highly lucrative businesses whose children simply aren't interested in the industry. That's another reality founders sometimes overlook. Your dream does not automatically become your child's dream. A genuine legacy business is certainly possible. But it requires something worth inheriting: profitability, transferable systems, capable leadership, durable assets and a company that can function beyond its founder. Then there is an entirely separate question: Does the next generation actually want it?

Legacy isn't created because your children share your last name. It has to be built.

“I'm Really Good at What I Do”

This may be the biggest surprise waiting for talented people who become entrepreneurs. Being exceptional at your craft does not make you exceptional at building a company around your craft. A brilliant chef still needs customers. A gifted consultant still needs positioning. An extraordinary designer still needs financial controls. A talented contractor still needs operations. A phenomenal therapist still needs scheduling, billing and customer communication.

This is where Mad Hatter Syndrome begins to emerge. Especially when bootstrapping, the entrepreneur suddenly discovers that owning a business means wearing an absurd number of hats. Marketing, sales, bookkeeping, technology, customer service, operations, hiring, leadership and strategy all start competing for attention.

You don't get to eliminate an essential business function because you dislike it. You can eventually delegate it. You can hire specialists. You can automate parts of it. You can build systems around it. But the business still needs it.

You could be the best person in the world at your craft and remain invisible because nobody knows you exist. You could become visible but fail because nobody understands your value. You could communicate your value beautifully and still fail because your operations are so disorganized that customers receive a terrible experience. Talent matters. But talent is one component inside a much larger machine.

Stop Letting “Just” Hide the Work

None of this is an argument against entrepreneurship. It's an argument for seeing entrepreneurship clearly. Complexity doesn't have to frighten you. In fact, understanding complexity can make business considerably less frightening because vague problems become visible problems. And visible problems can be diagnosed, prioritized and solved.

The dangerous entrepreneur isn't the one who realizes the mountain is enormous. It's the one standing at base camp in sneakers because somebody online told him climbing it was easy.

So replace the old wiring:

“I just need to ______.”

with:

“What actually has to be true for ______ to happen?”

That question forces the hidden system into view.

If you need to “get the word out,” what has to happen for strangers to become customers?
If you want to build a legacy company, what has to exist for the business to become a valuable transferable asset?
If you're exceptional at your craft, what other capabilities must exist around that talent for a successful company to emerge?

Those are CEO questions.

The Gambit

Catch yourself the next time you describe a major business objective using the word just . Then remove it. Write down everything that actually has to happen for that outcome to become true. You may discover that what looked like one problem is really five interconnected systems—and that realization is useful, because now you're finally dealing with reality.

That's also exactly why I created the CEO Diagnostic . Sometimes the hardest part isn't solving the problem. It's seeing the real problem and understanding how the pieces fit together. You don't need someone standing at the bottom of Everest yelling, “Keep climbing!” You need a map.

How To Start A Business When You're Low On Funds

thomas@minieri.com (Thomas Minieri) — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 23:38:07 GMT

Think You're Too Broke To Start A Business? Think Again

Published in Forbes | July 31, 2023 | Author: Thomas Minieri -- In the first few chapters of my book, I tell the story of how I started my first company in my mid-20s, with only $30 to my name. I was a struggling artist, and after getting fired from my not-so-well-paying job, I found myself being an unemployed, broke artist. I took the plunge into the crazy world of entrepreneurship as an act of sheer desperation. Ten years later, my company had 16 locations in six states and employed about 50 professionals; revenues surpassed $12 million.

Recently, I was at a business conference, and I shared this story with the small group of colleagues sitting at my table. To my surprise, one of the people at my table boldly stated, “Everyone knows you can’t start a business with $30.” Fortunately, my mid-20s self never got that memo, because I did in fact start my company with $30. Here’s how I did it and what other entrepreneurs can learn from my story.

Not only was I out of money when I started my company, but foreclosure proceedings had just begun on my small townhouse because of non-payment on my mortgage. To raise money, I listed all my possessions on eBay, including things that were sentimental to me. Most notable among those items was a rare model train set that my father—who had passed away a few months earlier—had given me. I made $2,000 on that sale and about $500 selling everything else I owned. That money gave me a few months’ budget buffer for food and basic living expenses.

If you feel you do not have any money to start a business, then go through every possession you own—no exceptions—and evaluate if you would rather keep that possession or use it to pursue the lifestyle being a successful entrepreneur can bring you. You may be surprised by just how much money you can scrounge up to get your business off the ground.

To further keep me financially afloat, I got a second job in the morning, as I needed to be available for my business which primarily operated in the evenings. Getting a second job while you build your business can be smart so long as the second job doesn’t hinder your entrepreneurial ambitions. Is juggling two jobs exhausting? Yes, very much so. But I was willing to do whatever it took to get my company off the ground.

Leverage Skills Or Gain Skills

I was in the performing arts industry, but I was also a talented visual artist and had dabbled in graphic design and website design in high school as a hobby. I didn’t realize it at first, but having these skills was invaluable. I was able to leverage my abilities and create a decent website and brand for my company.

As a marketing coach now, I do not recommend do-it-yourself website projects for underfunded entrepreneurs who are inexperienced with website design because a poor first impression can kill any hope of making sales. What I do recommend to broke startup entrepreneurs is investing time into learning the ins and outs of graphic design, website design and sales copywriting. These skills are a must if you want to start a business and can be costly if you pay someone else to do these tasks. I caution anyone against hiring a cheap designer or copywriter; you get what you pay for. Cheap often means low quality, and a low-quality brand tends to yield low sales. If you are not creatively inclined, it may take you time and push you out of your comfort zone to learn these types of skills, but they could prove to be some of the most valuable short- and long-term ones you develop as a modern entrepreneur.

Use Clever Advertising

So how did I spend my $30? It—along with every penny I made for the first six months—went into advertising. People like unexpected surprises. I made a clever certificate that awarded its recipient a free month of my services. “You’ve just been awarded...” is a more enticing proposition than “Call for a free...” All $30 went to printing a giant stack of these awards. My girlfriend—now wife—helped me stuff mailboxes with these awards. We targeted all the wealthy neighborhoods in the area. Within a few days, I got my first customer, then my second and then my third.

While grassroots marketing (passing out flyers or business cards, attending networking meetings, posting on social media, or other low-yield, time-heavy promotional activities) helped me get started, I quickly realized that these were not sustainable methods of promoting my business. Not only did these types of marketing methods consume my time, but they simply didn’t give me the reach I needed to find success. The best I could expect was to pass out maybe 40 to 50 flyers in a day’s time.

The problem with grassroots marketing methods is that they do produce some results, which convinces many new entrepreneurs to keep doing them. But these methods don’t tend to produce constant, consistent and predictable results. Instead, consider implementing a marketing model that automates your prospecting efforts and dramatically improves your reach. The sales copy on my flyer proved effective, which gave me the confidence to push it out to the masses. I stopped stuffing mailboxes (which reached dozens of homes) and leveled up my marketing by putting my flyer in a local magazine (which reached tens of thousands of homes). Clever messaging paired with a broad-reach approach was a winning marketing strategy for me.

Conclusion

If you want to start a business on the cheap, then you’ve got to put everything on the line because you’ll need at least some money for basic living expenses and advertising. Get a handle on your marketing skills and get away from small-scale random acts of marketing that produce little to no results to work toward the fast track to success.

How Much Should You Spend on Marketing?

thomas@minieri.com (Thomas Minieri) — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 23:33:43 GMT

The Entrepreneur's Quick Guide to Advertising Spend

Published in Forbes | April 13, 2022 | Author: Thomas Minieri -- When determining your marketing budget, there are several key factors to consider. Marketing encompasses everything from branding and website development to communications and sales. It is a big header, and each component needs to be well thought out to ensure your entire marketing system is firing on all cylinders.

Branding Overview
Building a brand is not just for large companies. It is the foundation of every business of any size and in any industry. Your brand is your first impression; it is comprised of the visuals that represent your products or services combined with the words used to communicate those products and services. Everything from logo design to sales copy is what makes your brand unique. A successful brand conveys credibility, while an underfunded brand creates doubt. One of my favorite sayings sums up the vibe of branding: How you do anything is how you do everything. Does your brand image tell prospects that you are professional, or does it send the message that you are low budget and disorganized? Branding is about perception.

Branding Spend
Start off with a professionally designed logo, a defined color palette, a selection of unique photos or carefully selected stock images and well-written sales copy. With a focus in marketing on return on investment (ROI), it might be challenging or impossible to track the effectiveness of many branding efforts. I consider branding an investment that makes every other part of your marketing strategy more effective. A poor brand hurts everything while a great brand helps everything. A business owner may spend anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 for initial startup branding and additional funds for ongoing updates and further development.

Advertising Overview
Any effort that directly promotes your business to prospects can be considered advertising. Options may include running paid ads on social media or search engines, posting on social media, email marketing campaigns, direct mail campaigns, billboards, radio spots, outside salespeople or networking events. Your advertising budget should also include the cost to create any content that will be utilized in the actual advertisements as well as the cost of managing advertising campaigns.

Advertising Spend
My rule of thumb with respect to advertising spend is to have two budgets in mind: one to sustain current revenues and another for robust growth. If you want to maintain current revenue amounts, then 5% to 10% of sales allocated toward advertising may suffice. If you want rapid growth, then you may need to push that number higher, possibly to 20% or more depending on the industry and type of business you operate. A startup business should commit to a fixed number for their advertising spend as their revenue may be too low to utilize a percentage of sales as a gauge. For many small businesses, $1,000 per month is a reasonable minimum advertising spend.

Communications
I call communications "marketing insurance." If you are going to spend money on branding and advertising, then make sure leads are managed properly. The first step to achieving this is to streamline the methods by which prospects can connect with you. Having too many methods (such as telephone, email, chat, texting and messaging) can be overwhelming. I prefer the good old-fashioned telephone. While I also like chat for website communication, I strive to get the prospect on the phone as soon as possible. Personal correspondence with prospects is crucial in many industries.

Communication Spend
The costs for proper communication can vary between industries. Spend what needs to be spent to ensure you are not losing leads due to unresponsiveness. Failure to manage your communication systems properly can be fatal to a business as money is being wasted on advertisements that are not turning into sales. Another aspect of communications and "marketing insurance" is customer service. The last thing you want is for a new customer to ask for a refund due to poor service.

Sales
Sales is under the marketing umbrella as the prospect has not yet purchased. The prospect saw your credible brand promoted in an advertisement, then they visited your website to learn more and now they are ready to make a purchase!

Sales Spend
Like communications, your sales spend will vary between industries. The goal here is to develop professional sales presentations or sales methods that clearly explain in detail the benefits of your offerings in a manner that encourages the prospect to make a purchase. Graphic design slideshows can work well and may help your team stay focused when presenting. Keep them fun and interesting. Videos and other media are also smart investments to improve sales results. If you rely on a sales team, they should be properly dressed, polite, knowledgeable and able to clearly communicate your products or services. Make sure they have the tools they need to succeed.

Customer Acquisition Cost
I tend to summarize marketing spend into one primary data point: customer acquisition cost (CAC). This is the total cost to get one new customer and includes your branding efforts, advertising spend, designer and marketing team salaries, and sales process costs. To find this number, simply add up all the above expenses and divide by the number of customers you acquired in that same timeframe. It makes for good business practice to evaluate your CAC annually and work to get that number lower each year without diminishing your brand. Avoid cutting your marketing budget, rather work to refine your marketing effectiveness. Starving your business of crucial marketing components is never a smart decision.

Conclusion
A well-thought-out marketing plan can make or break a company. It can also separate a company that is stuck in a revenue plateau from one that is soaring to new heights. I took my first company, a service-based studio business, from a small underfunded startup to a bustling national franchise in just six years. My CAC was about $250 per customer in years one and two. As our brand and marketing systems were perfected, I was able to lower that number to $110 per customer. This improved profitability and made my brand attractive to prospective franchisees.

The Positive Effects Of A Modern Brand

thomas@minieri.com (Thomas Minieri) — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:28:35 GMT

Not Sure If You Should Change Up Your Brand? These Tips Will Help

Published in Forbes | November 16, 2021 | Author: Thomas Minieri -- I was flat broke when I started my first company. I ran out of money after being unemployed and under-employed for over a year. My credit cards were maxed, and I didn't know anyone who could loan me money to help me get started. I was at the end. I used my last $30 in a last-ditch effort to find something that would work, hoping that my new business venture would be that thing. I was an artist but had never dabbled in graphic design. I came up with a simple, yet catchy, black-and-white flyer and made as many copies of that flyer that $30 could afford me. On the bottom of that flyer was my logo. It was basic, simple yet interesting, made with love and desperation.

Fast-forward three years and my company was booming. I was in my own retail space, had cultivated a team of employees and was about to open my second location. One key to my success, even at this early stage, was my constant commitment to marketing and advertising. For me, advertising was always the first bill to be paid, not the last. Paying for advertisements this month ensured that my phone rang with new customers next month. My company grew, as did my skill as a marketer. I soon realized that ad quality mattered just as much as ad frequency. It was time to update my brand and improve my company image.

To me, branding equates to credibility. My established competitors and my franchise competitors had polished, professional brands. Their logos were trendy, modern and well-known. I was an up-and-coming nobody who posed no threat to anyone, and my homemade brand only reinforced that reality. But that was about to change. I called around for a professional designer to help me articulate my ideas. I found a guy. We hit it off, and I hired him to help me design and implement a real brand.

While I was very attached to my original logo, I was more attached to the money that my new brand would bring in for me. I put my emotions aside and got to work on creating something new with my designer colleague. A few weeks later, my company launched its new brand image complete with professional logo design, brand elements, a matching website and marketing collateral. It was a real brand for a real company, and it made a real difference. My second location opened with our new logo on the front door. My new brand was a success from day one. Advertisements became more effective. Utilizing more professional branding in our sales presentations awarded my team with increased sales conversions. The public, as well as my competitors, began to notice and recognize my company. We were gaining momentum.

Fast-forward another two years, and my company was producing seven-figure revenues and I had a team of over twenty professionals working for me. I had developed our own software application and operated a full-time call center to field incoming inquiries from prospects. My brand was well-established as a leader in the industry. I was operating two very successful stores and had established a unique business model and system. It was at that time that I decided to franchise my brand and expand nationwide. Unfortunately, for my company name, it would not be able to come along for that journey. My business name included the word "Carolina" in it. Obviously, franchisees outside of the Carolinas would not find my business name beneficial. Thus, if I were to franchise, I would have to rename my entire company.

Fast-forward four years and my franchise system had over a dozen locations across six states. The new business name was a huge success and ushered in higher levels of company culture and brand awareness. It was a home run.

In just a few years my brand evolved from the original logo I made on the cheap to a professional logo and brand that became well-known in my industry to a complete name change and brand overhaul created for my franchise system. Every time I reinvented my company's brand image, it turned out to be a positive change. It stirred things up a bit. It made things fresh and new. It made people take notice, curious as to what was up with my company. Never once did a customer come to me with disdain for my decision to change the logo, the brand colors or even the name of the entire company when I franchised. I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising along the way and never once did I notice any loss of brand exposure with any of the revisions. It was never a back step.

I've since sold my franchise system and the assets it accumulated. Today, I operate a marketing and creative agency. I combine a decade of real-world entrepreneurship with my now finetuned creative and design skills. I meet with business owners daily who are cautious to merely update their dated logo. If that's you and you're hesitant to change your brand or are nervous as to what a revision to your brand might do to the investment you've already made in brand recognition, then perhaps this narrative will provide some perspective. I made many changes to my brand, and everyone was massively positive. Simply put, people notice the new and forget the old much quicker than we emotionally attached entrepreneurs would like to believe.

Is your logo more than five years old? Is it more than ten years old? Google changes its logo almost every day, and people aren't forgetting where to search for things online. Is your business name dated and holding you back from gaining new opportunities? If so, make like Elsa and let it go. Change doesn't mean you forget the hard work you put in during your startup years. Come up with something fresh and new that will take your company to the new heights it deserves.

Sales Tips For Success

thomas@minieri.com (Thomas Minieri) — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 21:02:11 GMT

5 Helpful Strategies to Close The Deal

Published in Forbes | June 2, 2021 | Author: Thomas Minieri -- Part of achieving success in business is establishing an effective marketing strategy for your company. Marketing is a broad term and includes not only the advertisements used to get leads, but also the sales strategy that turns those leads into action by a customer that results in revenue for the business.

There have been several instances when my agency has generated leads for a client only to have that client struggle to turn those leads into revenue. This is often indicative of a sales problem, not an advertising problem. Sales is largely based on communication and perception. Here are some of my top tips for improving your sales skills, which should help you land more and better deals.

INITIAL CONTACT

I find that limiting the methods through which customers can communicate with a business can help in the sales process. Having too many ways for customers to contact you can lead to internal confusion, overlooked messages and missed opportunities. Email can be slow, and the back-and-forth can become tedious and unproductive. Instant messaging is decent, as is texting. My favorite method to communicate with prospects is still the telephone. It allows the prospect to immediately connect with an actual person.

If the person answering the telephone is well-trained and follows a well-thought-out script, they should be able to funnel most calls to the next step of the sales process. An initial phone call with a prospect should include a welcoming introduction, confirmation that the prospect made a good decision by calling the business and a basic overview of expectations.

IN-PERSON CONNECTION

While many businesses are striving for automation and remote interaction, there is something to be said for in-person human connection. Some industries, like e-commerce and tech, can get away with limited or no human contact. Other industries, like many service businesses, are dependent on a personal touch.

People connect with other people and with human faces, not with computer screens. People also buy from people they like. Avoid being swayed by strategies used in other industries or even by your competitors. Going more personal when everyone else is going more impersonal may give you a unique edge that helps you stand out in the crowd and land more sales.

REPRESENTATION

In an age when individuality is the trend, it may be advantageous to be different and focus on uniformity and theme. Incorporating things like dress codes and sales scripts convey professionalism and consistency and can give your prospects confidence that they can trust you and that you are organized enough to deliver as expected. Remember, how you do anything is how you do everything.

Whether you're making your first impression on a prospect, or it's your time to present to a client, your physical appearance and demeanor can play an important and often overlooked role. Do you want your prospect's first few impressions of you to be casual and carefree, or uniform and professional? Personal preferences should take a back seat to prospect perception. If you do not convey the right message, you could lose the opportunity.

If you manage a sales team, you may find that they welcome formality and uniformity as it lets them know they are part of a team and a brand as opposed to being lone wolves. It can help them with confidence in sales situations.

PRESENTATION

Many businesses lack any form of presentation for their products or services. In many industries, potential customers do not know they need to do business with you. They may not even know that your industry exists or is something they need. Communication and education are crucial in the sales process. Therefore, it is essential to formulate a proper sales presentation to ensure that prospects understand what it is you offer and how it will help make their lives better.

A sales presentation can be verbally communicated by a salesperson or can be in the form of visuals, slideshows, before-and-after portfolios or short videos. Presentations should always be focused on how your products or services improve the lives of your prospects and how easy it is for them to gain these benefits.

ASKING PROSPECT TO ASK

Once you have connected with your prospect in a personal manner, represented your brand well, and presented your offerings and benefits clearly, it is time for your prospect to act. The trick to getting a prospect to make a transaction is to ask them to do so. The simple act of asking can make all the difference and is all too often overlooked by salespeople. Nerves, doubt and the desire to be liked can creep into the subconscious mind of even the best salespeople from time to time. If you genuinely believe that your product or service will better your prospect’s life, asking them for business can be a beneficial thing to do for them.

When asking a prospect to act, phrasing is key. Be careful not to use the word “or." The common scenario goes like this: “Would you like to schedule a meeting with me tomorrow or ... ?” Here, the salesperson subconsciously leaves the sentence hanging and gives the prospect a way out. If what you are selling will benefit them, there should be no reason to give them a way out of the sale.

Another scenario may go like this: “Would you like to schedule a meeting with me?” In this scenario, the salesperson is offering a “yes” option and a “no” option, leaving the door open for the prospect to decline. Instead, offer two options of "yes," such as: “I am available to meet with you Wednesday at 1 p.m. or Friday at 11 a.m. Which one would you prefer?” This option conveys confidence and control.

CONCLUSION

While these sales tips are geared toward making in-person connections, they can easily be applied to businesses that need to be more automated. Success in sales takes practice and focus. Hopefully, these tips steer you down a path of improved sales and increased prosperity.

Smart Spending: How To Be A Frugal Business Owner Without Being Cheap

thomas@minieri.com (Thomas Minieri) — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 20:22:49 GMT

Are You Financially Strangling Your Business? 7 Tips to Set You Straight

Published in Forbes | September 8, 2020 | Author: Thomas Minieri -- My experience working with franchisees and small business owners has given me a unique vantage point when dealing with common problems that ail many entrepreneurs. A very common trait I’ve noticed in small business owners is their struggle discerning the difference between smart financial decisions and blanket cost-cutting.

While cutting costs may be beneficial, it can also be fatal if done without careful consideration of outcomes. Companies do not grow by cutting costs; they grow by increasing sales. Therefore, if the owner, in an attempt to lower expenses, deprives essential business systems of needed capital, then it could lead to stagnant growth or negative cash flow. It’s important to consider the unintended consequences of not spending money on important business systems. Many business owners may think they are being frugal when in reality they are being cheap. Frugality leads to efficiency, while being cheap leads to a whole host of problems.

GO BEYOND THE ESSENTIALS

Only spending money on things that are essential will make your company bland and indistinguishable from competitors. For discussion purposes, consider a restaurant business bathroom. Can the owner get away with white walls, a standard sink and a standard toilet? Sure. While extra nice fixtures in the bathroom may seem frivolous to some, many customers will be positively impacted by a high-quality bathroom experience. It may make a lasting impression and send the message that the business exudes quality and has a unique personality. Just because something isn’t absolutely needed doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest in it. Your company’s image is worth the money!

MARKET & PROMOTE

In my experience, small business owners all too often don’t spend enough money on proper marketing and advertising. My personal rule of thumb is to spend 5 to 8% of your goal gross revenue. This means that if you want a company that generates half a million dollars in sales, then you should start spending $25,000 to $40,000 in advertising now.

Once fueled with proper marketing spend, your company should be on its way to achieving your goal. Avoid spending based on where your company is today; instead, spend based on where you want your company to be tomorrow. If this formula is legitimately not possible for your business, then take it in stride. The idea here is that the common 5% to 8% of revenue philosophy may be too low for actual growth, especially if you are a startup with low revenues or a business in a highly competitive industry. Alternatively, consider two marketing spend percentages: one that sustains your current gross revenue and another that promotes growth.

NEVER NEGLECT INSURANCE

Smart business owners use insurance as a hedge against losses. In my experience, many business owners get hit with life circumstances they did not foresee. A simple umbrella plan or policy that pays you cash if you can’t work due to injury or illness can make all the difference when faced with the unexpected.

It’s not frugal to ignore insurance; it’s cheap. And it may cost you everything. If you don’t have adequate insurance, get it today. It’s simply not worth the risk.

WHEN IT COMES TO MARKETING, COVER YOUR BASES

Make sure that your customer service and sales teams have every tool they need for success. This is what I call marketing insurance. The idea is to take every action possible to ensure that your marketing dollars (the 5% to 8% of goal gross revenue mentioned above) actually turn into sales.

It’s bad business to spend money on marketing only to ignore things like training your receptionist who answers the phone or buying tools and materials for your sales team who closes deals with customers. It’s almost always money well spent when it comes to communications systems with customers, sales presentations for product clarity and modern equipment for your workers. In short, if you’re going to spend money to get the phone to ring, make sure there are no broken links in your sales process chain.

NOT EVERYTHING CAN BE DIY

In general, I believe too many people are overconfident when it comes to projects that should be handled by professionals. The desire to save money and “do it yourself” often comes with unintended consequences.

Unfortunately, in business, many of those unintended consequences are not easily identifiable. For example, the business owner who decides to save money by building their own website may never realize that their company is suffering due to their desire to save a few thousand dollars. Branding and marketing DIY projects often backfire because they tend to yield low company credibility.

Construction and repair projects can also prove costly if not handled by professionals. I once had a new franchisee who asked me about a plumbing issue. I told them not to mess with plumbing or electrical despite the temptation to save money. They ignored my advice, and like clockwork, I received a desperate phone call when this franchisee’s brand-new facility flooded with water. My advice the second time around? Shut the water main, and call a plumber!

While some DIY flops can create those “we’ll look back at this someday and laugh” moments, many can seriously stifle company growth due to lack of awareness. The smart business owner knows their strengths and hires professionals to fill in the many gaps.

LEARN FROM THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE YOU

The cheap business owner avoids spending money when they can and should. Being frugal in business means you look past the short-term solution and consider the big-picture consequences with respect to time and money.

If you think about how spending or saving a small amount of money today will impact you tomorrow, then you are well on your way to becoming a savvy entrepreneur. The last tip in this article is to remember to seek the advice and guidance of those who have gone before you. Education and training, especially from successful entrepreneurs, is always a smart investment choice, and one that may not only save you money, but help you grow and scale to your heart’s content.

How to Survive and Thrive in a Down Economy

thomas@minieri.com (Thomas Minieri) — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 20:06:50 GMT

Published in Forbes | April 22, 2020 | Author: Thomas Minieri — When economies fall apart—and this happens more than you might think—many business owners find themselves in a position of desperation. As business owners, many of us are all in, meaning our livelihoods and the ability to provide for our families rests upon the success of our businesses. When circumstances around us change that are outside of our control, stress, fear and anxiety can build quickly.

During the last major economic crash in 2008, I was a new business owner with a company that was only about two years old. To make matters worse, I sold luxury services, which, at the time, were at the bottom of people’s lists of things to buy. I was faced with the decision to call it quits or fight for my company and make it work despite the economic situation we faced.

I made the decision to fight for my company and innovate to accommodate the new economic environment. The strategies I learned at that time proved most valuable because my company not only survived the downturn, but grew tremendously. This catapulted my career as an entrepreneur for many years thereafter.

FOCUS ON THE POSITIVES

Value is often found in going against the flow. That means having a positive outlook even when things seem bleak. It’s not that you should ignore reality; rather, approach circumstances with a positive attitude. For example, if unemployment is at 20%, focus on the 80% of people who have jobs and money to spend. Find or adjust products and services to target those people.

ADJUST YOUR RATES

If you need money, raise your rates. During the 2008 downturn, I adjusted our services from an $89 one-hour session to a $75 forty-minute session, which raised our per-minute rate. However, the cost of a session from a customer’s viewpoint dropped. This clever adjustment gave the perception to customers that we had lowered rates, but in reality, our rates had increased. The lower perceived cost of services undercut our competitors and allowed our luxury services to be available to a larger audience. Additionally, the shorter session time allowed us to handle more sessions per day, which further increased revenue and improved efficiency. Our customers didn’t mind paying less for a session with the trade-off being that it was 15 minutes shorter, and our die-hard customers just bought more sessions. Whatever your industry, be creative and find ways to adjust rates (not lower rates). Consider offering additional value without giving things away for free or at a discount.

REMEMBER, BRANDING EQUALS CREDIBILITY

There is a fair amount of evidence indicating that branding is one of the top reasons people choose a company. Many people choose a familiar brand, even if that brand has shortcomings, over a less familiar brand that may offer better quality. It’s human nature to go with a sure bet. Given this concept, I believe it is crucial for businesses to spend a good amount of energy on branding. A solid brand gives your company an impactful first impression with new prospects. In a slow economy, people are more cautious with their spending and their choices, so make sure your brand comes across as highly credible. Improve and update your logo and branding elements, as well as the fonts, themes and color palettes that represent your company. Build attractive sales presentations and establish clear marketing messages that convey your offerings in three seconds or less. It’s about credibility.

DOUBLE YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

In a down economy, most business owners look for ways to cut expenses. Cutting some expenses may be helpful; cutting others may be fatal. In my experience, cutting marketing is almost always fatal. In the economic downturn of 2008, I doubled my marketing budget while most of my competitors cut their marketing budgets or eliminated them entirely. It was very tight financially for us to do this, but it paid off because the marketing landscape was much less busy. Fewer competitors gave me a higher ROI on my advertising dollars. Consider finding new methods of advertising as well. Economic changes often bring changes in societal behavior. Things that once worked may not work as well anymore; things that haven’t worked may be good ideas now.

DO MORE TO SURVIVE

In 2008, a colleague of mine gave me some great business advice. His company operated large-scale entertainment events, and he experienced a sudden drop in attendance. To survive the downturn, he had to add 20% more events to his calendar just to make the same amount of money he was making in a strong economy. While he had to work harder to make the same amount of money, it was only for a season, and his business survived the downturn as a result. Once the economy got back on track, his business boomed due to his expansion. Sometimes expansion is for growth; sometimes expansion is for survival. Either way, you’re growing and not shrinking.

GET LOANS FOR EXPANSION

In a down economy, the government often lowers interest rates on loans to encourage business expansion. The government also earmarks money specifically to aid small businesses. Take advantage of this as an amazing opportunity to get cheaper money to grow your business. In a strong economy, interest rates are often so high that it is extremely expensive for businesses to finance anything.

In the last down economy, I was able to get an SBA loan to purchase real estate for expansion. This opportunity allowed us to purchase discounted real estate in a down market with a low interest rate. By the time the economy recovered, we owned several commercial properties and no longer needed to pay landlords rent. Plus, our mortgage payments were far lower than rent and did not go up annually as is the case with most leases.

Whatever storm you are facing will pass. Hopefully, these tips will help you discover your own creative solutions that will allow you to survive and thrive.

Is Franchising Right For Your Business?

thomas@minieri.com (Thomas Minieri) — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 21:29:33 GMT

5 Benefits of Franchising Your Business

Published in Forbes | February 18, 2020 | Author: Thomas Minieri -- If you’ve thought about scaling your business, you might have wondered whether or not franchising is the right choice. For me, transitioning from a small business owner to a franchisor helped me grow my business and scale much faster than I would have been able to do on my own—all while avoiding the excessive risk of a capital-intensive expansion.

Small business owners too often make the mistake of wanting to do everything themselves, including scale. If you’re ready to take your company to new heights, then consider some of these noteworthy benefits that I found during my experience as a franchisor.

FUNDING FOR EXPANSION

It can be costly to take your business to new markets or to expand with additional locations. One of the most appealing aspects of franchising is the ability to quickly scale by funding your expansion while avoiding taking on excessive risk, raising outside capital and increasing your overhead.

With a franchise model, the franchisee typically purchases a geographical territory where they’ll operate the brand. They are often responsible for much of the startup cost associated with opening that new location, including the build-out, marketing and funding of the location until its breakeven point is reached. For this reason, franchising your business may be a smart choice if you want to expand.

BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Another valuable reason to consider franchising is to maintain high customer service as the business grows. It’s no secret in business that quality tends to decline as a company expands. If customer service is a big part of your business, then franchising may help ensure it stays up to par.

With franchising, each additional location has a franchisee/owner with a genuine interest in preserving the reputation of that location because, while it’s the franchisor’s brand, that location is the franchisee’s business. You’re placing your trust in the hands of someone else, and it makes a difference when that person has invested money just like you have.

A franchisee has their money on the line and will typically be more invested in the customer’s experience and overall success of their location than a store manager who is an employee of a larger corporation. Better customer service overall and a group of people working together with a vested interest in the brand is a win for the franchisor and franchisee alike.

VOLUME DISCOUNTS

Volume discounts are usually out of reach for businesses with only one location, but they are easy to attain with a franchise model. Utilizing a single distributor for all of your franchises often opens the door for volume discounts while streamlining your company’s distribution.

The perks of instant volume discounts are appealing to prospective franchisees because they can be enjoyed even before developing their customer base — something that would be out of reach for a single small business.

MARKETING BENEFITS

Marketing is essential for a business’s success, especially when trying to get it off the ground. For small business owners, marketing can sometimes get lost in the chaos of everything, leading to a lack of brand awareness in their community. With a franchising model, franchisees enjoy the benefits of having a bigger marketing machine behind them, while the franchisor ensures their brand is being promoted consistently and uniformly in every market in which locations exist.

TECHNOLOGY

Franchising can open the possibilities of what’s feasible for your company in terms of technology as well. For a business with just one location, it would likely be cost-prohibitive to create customized software for booking, training or customer loyalty. However, a customized software solution becomes more cost-effective as the number of businesses that will be using it rises.

When I began to franchise my business, I consolidated all of our appointment bookings and customer service management into one call center to facilitate all phone and internet traffic for every location. We required our franchisees to utilize this call center and pay us fees to cover the expenses needed to run it.

Our call center was a huge success for our company because it eliminated the need to hire and manage a receptionist at each location, improved communications and sales with customers, and freed up our franchisees’ time to focus on other aspects of their businesses. It was a win-win arrangement and an example of capitalizing on the benefits of the franchise model.

Having a customized software solution for your franchised business can make it easier for all franchises to operate uniformly, improve the overall customer experience, make reporting more accurate and give your brand a competitive edge.

Franchise models can provide many benefits for franchisors and franchisees alike. Franchisors can enjoy scaling their business without sacrificing quality or raising outside funds, while franchisees benefit from entering an already proven business model with in-place resources behind it. It’s no small feat to build a successful business, and franchising may be the ideal way for you to get the most out of your company.

Fatal Startup Pitfalls: Do's And Don'ts To Avoid Them

thomas@minieri.com (Thomas Minieri) — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 20:16:08 GMT

For Entrepreneurs: 5 Ways to Prosper Without Peril

Published in Forbes | September 23, 2019 | Author: Thomas Minieri -- Many people start their first business starry-eyed and with high hopes of success, only to be rattled when things get tough or don't go as expected. My experiences as a successful small-business-owner-turned-franchisor have allowed me the opportunity to not only learn from my own business experiences but also to learn from our franchisees' experiences.

Business, especially new business, can be tricky. One major advantage of purchasing a franchise is that franchise systems are typically set up to help new franchisees avoid as many problems as possible. If you are starting a new business without the benefit of a franchise system, you are going to need to spend a good bit of time planning and seeking guidance from others in your industry who have experienced and overcome challenges. Doing so before you launch will help you avoid unnecessary issues later.

Franchise or not, these common pitfalls plague many new business owners. Below are my top five dangerous startup pitfalls that, with some insight and planning, can be avoided.

DON'T UNDER-FUND STARTUP MARKETING

In my experience, many franchisors require their franchisees to spend a certain amount of money on initial grand opening marketing and advertising because they know how crucial proper marketing can be early in the life of a new business. Many small business owners who are not part of a franchise system dramatically under-fund initial marketing efforts.

If handled properly, marketing should produce a positive return on investment (ROI) in a short amount of time. A well-designed and managed marketing campaign and sales system is like a well-oiled machine: You put $500 of marketing in one end and $750 in sales comes out the other end. With that knowledge, why wouldn’t a new business owner spend everything they could on marketing and sales?

The answer is all too often based in fear. Most small business owners don’t believe marketing will produce ROI or they don’t know how to build a marketing system that will produce ROI. They are fearful of losing money so they take no action, which can have devastating consequences. Don’t let this fear hold you back. Before you go into business, make sure your marketing, advertising and sales processes are well-thought-out and that you have a proper plan and budget in place.

DON'T UNDER-FUND ONGOING MARKETING

Franchisors often mandate ongoing marketing spend requirements for their franchisees because they know how important it is to keep leads and prospective customers coming into the business‘s pipeline. Funding a properly built marketing system is akin to keeping your car filled with fuel. Cutting the marketing budget for even one month can negatively affect revenue and cause a shortfall in the proceeding month‘s budget due to lower sales. This, in turn, leads to that month’s marketing getting cut and continued lower sales. Thus, a downward spiral begins.

It can be challenging or impossible to recover from a downward spiral caused by marketing cuts. So, avoid cutting marketing in the first place. Instead, find other ways to lower expenses in a startup environment or if you find yourself in a slow sales season.

DON'T BE ABOVE THE RULES

When you’re just getting started, it’s crucial to set and adhere to policies and procedures. Business hours should be maintained without deviation, even on slow days or weekends. Customer service processes and sales scripts should be followed without alteration or shortcuts. If you’re the only employee in your new organization, it is even more important to resist breaking the rules — you’ll find that trends and habits form quickly. Remember, the easiest time to set a company‘s policies and procedures is when the team is small.

So, take time in your organization’s early months to figure out your processes and then stick to them without fail. As the owner, you should be the living representation of your company’s culture business systems, not the person who is above the rules. If you show you’re willing to break procedure, employees will follow your lead as the business grows.

DO PROPERLY EVALUATE SYSTEMS

Problems are going to happen -- it's inevitable. I’ve seen that it’s common for newer business owners to misdiagnosis problems in their organizations. If business is slow, for example, it‘s a common diagnosis to blame the company’s marketing systems. However, the answer is rarely that simple. Even small mom-and-pop businesses are complex and comprised of multiple systems that work together.

Every owner should understand and track their company’s process chain: the system of systems that leads to a sale. If business is slow, evaluate the entire process chain to flesh out the problem. Is the marketing strategy producing leads? If so, is the telephone being answered properly? What about the sales team? If they are burning through leads, then the organization may need to restructure its sales systems or provide better sales training.

In this scenario, salespeople may be tempted to blame the marketing team by saying they are getting bad leads. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s just an excuse. Either way, if sales are low, the key to getting things back on track is a proper evaluation of your entire business, its people and its systems with the goal of pinpointing the exact problem or problems.

DO PREPARE IN TIMES OF PLENTY

It’s human nature to think that the good times will last forever. In my experience, people work harder when things are going poorly and tend to coast when things are going well. However, circumstances that are outside of your control can alter your world in an instant. The economy can change, your industry can change, a new competitor can move into your territory, or technology can advance quickly, leaving you falling behind.

If business is good, then push to gain more market share and work to set your company on firmer footing. Invest in better marketing systems, technology, more qualified staff or improved benefits for customers. When hard times come (and they always do), you’ll be better prepared to see it through.