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I spent fifteen years chasing an office, then gave it up in a coffee shop
A truck center, a suburban unit, and finally two hundred thousand square feet with a forty-foot sign on it. Then a stranger in the East Village said one…
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How to read a character before you sign
Three of my deals died within sight of the finish line. Not one of them failed on talent, funding or market. They failed on character, and in every…
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What four thousand dollars bought me
My first company never borrowed a cent. My second billed half a million a month and was starved for cash the entire time. The difference was not size.
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Discounting teaches people to wait
A price cut works the first time, works less well the second, and by the fourth has trained your best customers to stop buying at full price.
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A sounding board, or a shoulder
I once offered an underperforming employee help instead of a warning. His reaction told me more about how most companies are run than any management book has.
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Four stages and three layers
Every marketing seminar I have sat through says the same three things. The gap is never knowing what to do — it is knowing where each thing goes.
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Nobody teaches you to be an entrepreneur
An employee once asked me who counts as one. Thirty years in, I had never stopped to answer it, and the answer turned out not to be a…
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Policies cost more than they save
A company with excellent data about which customers matter can still have a system that makes it impossible for anyone to act on it.
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The ceiling was me
A logistics company I started in the eighties went from nothing to $120,000 a month in thirteen months, and then stopped dead. It took me a while to…
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Nobody searches for your company name
Branding and search optimization pull in opposite directions, and early-stage companies almost always resolve the tension the wrong way round.