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Hot tips for emerging company boards
Emerging companies comprise a significant portion of Colorado businesses. Venture capitalists, angel investors and founders make up the shareholders and the boards of directors of many of these companies. I spoke recently to Fran Wheeler, a partner in the Business Department of the Colorado Office...
Three great tips to accelerate success
Although leaders frequently engage me to help them find a shortcut of some sort—to more effective leadership, to a better strategy, to a more highly functioning team—we rarely find a solution that involves little work. Shortcuts to wealth are generally illegal. Shortcuts to leadership are typicall...
Is your promotional bio a bust?
Chances are, the people who need to know you, don’t. Your prospects don’t. Your website visitors, and social media contacts don’t. Even your clients don’t. That’s because, if you’re like many business professionals, your promotional bio is a bust. It may well be that your online promotional profil...
Exec wheels: Refreshing simplicity
The rap on Subaru for years was that while the line offered quality, the cars were stodgy and bereft of styling, and appealed to a small core group of people generally referred to, pejoratively, as gorp-eaters, environmentalists or worse. This is an important point: some really bad cars with sexy...
Mankind’s greatest disasters
It’s not reasonable to think that we will somehow reach an era of being disaster-free. Machines wear out, computers break down, and even our best attempts at making a failsafe system will eventually fail. Add in a few earthquakes and nature’s own mechanisms for disrupting things when we least expe...
PBCs a natural fit for ESOPs
Two well-known names to Colorado beer lovers—Odell Brewing of Fort Collins and Left Hand Brewing of Longmont— recently adopted employee ownership stock ownership plans (ESOPs). With this move, which restricts company ownership stakes to employees and management, the two companies joined the state’...
The futurist: Black Hat robots are coming
We are on the verge of having driverless buses delivering automated store clerks to retail shops that sell robots to other robots. Hmmmm. So where do humans fit into this equation? Much like handing us a shovel and asking us to dig our own grave, our man-made machines are being replaced with machi...
What’s your relaxation number?
Controlling your breathing gives you mindful power, more control of your mind and body – and more control over your life! When you inhale rapidly and deeply, you stimulate your sympathetic nervous system, which excites and energizes your mind and body in a healthy way. Anxious people usually breat...
Why you should embrace a disoriented life
Deep down, we all know a few simple things about what would make our business work, and we work hard to stuff them down deep. Because usually the thing that we know will make things work better has more to do with fixing me than fixing my business. I'd rather fix my business. We can sleep walk thr...
Aim high, shoot low
I’ve too often come across a business whose leaders chose a strategy of “me too” with no discernable difference between what they do and what their competitors do. A friend who just purchased a business with a well-known local brand told me that a gregarious founder built it but a “bean counter” p...
