All of My Blog Posts
How Digital Ocean Cost Us Thousands of Dollars in a Single Day
Here’s the rub for me: My belief is that bad stuff happens, and you need to own it. Digital Ocean definitely did not own it in this case. I wonder how the original founders of Digital Ocean would have reacted had they been in charge… For example, wouldn’t it be nice if an actual human…
Where uncertainty exists, don’t order specific.
4 Idiot Case Studies with 2 simple age-old business lessons.
“Now THAT was a good meeting!”
A single effective meeting can change the course of history for a company. Imagine if you could lead effective meetings EVERY DAY! You can, but it takes curiosity & practice. This article is a good place to start your journey to a more effective you.
Never Respond to RFPs & Custom Proposal Requests
Y’all who work at normal 9-5 jobs don’t need to deal with the B.S. that is an RFP process (or rather you get paid to deal with it).
But us freelancers gotta deal with a whole big bag of schtuff when it comes to custom proposals.
Here’s my quick-and-dirty RFP filtering process that I use every time.
(It’s about a minute read.)
Enjoy!
Toby
#business #smallbusiness #lifehacks #innovation #entrepreneurship #strategy #productivity #personaldevelopment #emotionalintelligence #culture #consultants #freelancers #contracts #freelancing
What content should I put on my homepage?
I see websites as one stop of many on the sales journey, useful to help get customers from Point A to Point B in the sales process (or maybe from Point D to Point E). If you are wondering about what to put on your homepage, start with these basic sales-related questions: Who, specifically, will…
The Horrors of Covering Your Own Ass
Today I emailed a very simple question to support@[companyname].com (2 sentences total). The automated response I got back was this: Keep in mind that the above was an auto-response and: It’s hard to read. Everything has the same import (e.g. none of it is important enough to call out separately). It’s long. It added absolutely-zero…
If something stupid makes money, then it’s not stupid.
I’ve seen some stupid things in my life…And some of them were really really smart. I remember a story from decades ago where the U.S. military was looking to equip the Stealth Bomber with a fancy computer-driven video system so the pilots could see behind them. Well, the computers failed to get the job done,…
There is no destination.
Coding is a process of failure followed by a moment of great joy. You’ve gotta ride through the failures to experience the joy…
Aim for 2%
Forget about aiming for big profits and complexity. Hitting your 2% Freedom Quotient will likely cause more positive change in your business than any other metric.
How to give constructive feedback to an employee
Here are 2 simple phrases to use when you need to alert and correct behavior of an employee.