The relationship with your customer is like the relationship with your significant other. You have to work at it every day to maintain and improve it. If you don't keep things interesting and exciting, your partner will get bored and eventually move on to someone else. You may be the best partner for them, but it will grow stale if you neglect the relationship, and they'll start wondering what else is…

You hear time and time again that you should never give up. You have to go through the obstacles to get to success. Sometimes you need to fight on despite all the difficulties, but other times it may be wiser to quit. The sooner you quit going down the wrong path, the sooner you can start going down the right path. You may have been lucky enough like Tiger Woods to…

The customer is always right is a slogan that began when customer service and modern retail stores were just coming into existence. It was a helpful way to train someone in the 1900s who had no concept of customer service. Now in the 2000s, we know that the customer is not always right. Some customers can be unreasonable and sometimes downright dishonest. You may have bent over backwards to get them…

When you first started, you may have gotten your first customers by word of mouth, through your personal network or walk-ins to your store. You may now be experiencing a lull in your business, or you managed to catch your breath and are ready to grow to the next level. The next level, though, requires a strategy — a strategy for gaining new customers. A strategy doesn’t need to be complicated…

Your customers don't care about your business or how long you have been around. They are neither interested in your achievements nor any other of your business's milestones. They care about what you can do for them. Everyone is on their own journey. We want to be successful and happy. In the story of our own lives, we are the hero. We are the main character in our own life while…

You're thinking about going into business with your rich uncle, your broke roommate, or the sharply dressed man you met at the bar last night. If you're looking to take on a business partner, you're probably thinking of someone with either capital or a specific skill set. Though most entrepreneurs crave something far more profound than that. It may sound crazy, but in my experience, it's emotional support that most entrepreneurs…

Coffee is a highly commoditized product. It can easily be made almost anywhere in the world with widely available ingredients at a very low cost. Coffee has been around for hundreds of years. Like salt, sugar, and rice, once these products started being mass-produced, it was a race to the bottom for prices. In business school, they'll teach you not to enter industries like this because it would be difficult to…

These so-called billionaire routines require one to get up at 4 AM to read, exercise and meditate. Neither reading, exercising, nor meditating generates any money at all. Unless you are a fitness model, no one will pay you to go to the gym. All these things will cost you time or money and sometimes both. To follow in the paths of successful people, we often try to replicate their habits. Instead,…

In 1961 John F Kennedy proposed that the US "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." At the time of this speech, the furthest the US had gone into space was 116 miles, and they had stayed there for a total of 15 minutes. To achieve this feat, they needed to build…

In the Kalahari Desert, there are a group of people who haven't changed their ways for tens of thousands of years. These are the San people. They are the oldest continuous inhabitants of Southern Africa. One could say that they are the first successful humans. So successful were their methods that they still use them today. Their timeless techniques can teach us something about success, both in life and in business.…