The Freestyle Entrepreneur

My friends say I have no life.  Except for some fishing, spoiling my grandkids, service work with the Lions and experimental cooking with/on my friends and family, I have no major distractions. That’s because I love to work.  I have found that there is nothing more thrilling than business … both working on mine and [...]

  On a quick day trip to Milwaukee yesterday, we scheduled dinner out with my son, his wife and their three children.  Jonny (Jonathan to the rest of the world) is a successful, 35-year-old partner in a mid-sized law firm, who maintains a good balance between super-long work weeks and family time.    During dinner, he apologized [...]

Hopefully, you are knee deep in 2010 planning … or, if you’re an overachiever, you’re already done.  That means you …   Have laid out your goals for the year. Mapped out the daily or weekly activities that will bring those goals to realization. Are chomping a the bit to break out of the gate on January 4 and [...]

Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. –James Madison The Issue: As much as Obama & Co. wants to direct the efforts of American business by appearing to be confident, in-charge leaders who know exactly how things will turn out, it’s all an illusion. No one in this administration has gotten his hands [...]

  This is part rant, part rave!  I’ve had it and am fed up about the ignorant, anti-capitalism noise coming from the President of the United States and those around him.  I expect this kind of idiocy from euro-trash, people who see the government as a huge tit from which all their needs flow.  But from our [...]

Guilty as charged.  I’ve cut my prices to my clients when times got tough.  The result? It made me look like just another hack writer out there.  In the end, I lost money and I lost business.   What I should have done:  Reminded my clients that I’m the best … and focused on how working with [...]

Amazing!  Every retailer this holiday season (and a whole lot of service people, it seems) is slashing prices to draw in customers.  I suspect more than a few are losing money on every sale … but figure they’ll make it up on volume.  Look for them to go belly up in the first quarter of [...]

Who’d have thought that getting paid would be so tough?  Well, welcome to the recession, often evidenced by customers who try to stretch their payments as far they can.  What to do to collect on overdue bills?  Try the following ten ideas:   1.     Have a system in place to deal with delinquencies.  Establish good collection [...]

Like Charlie Brown in a Peanuts cartoon standing by the mailbox in hope of receiving a Valentine’s Day card, too many of us small business owners  these days find ourselves anxiously waiting for the arrival of that overdue payment.  If the problem gets too serious, it can domino-affect our entire lives –  as we stretch [...]