Employees shouldn’t need a map to get help. If your internal support system wouldn’t survive five minutes with customers, it’s time to redesign it—because your employees are your most important customers.
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Growth gets the headlines. But scaling? That’s where companies break—or break through. This post breaks down my approach to building systems that let companies grow fast without losing their footing, based on real lessons from companies like SHIELD Illinois.
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Good ops integration isn’t about who won the deal. It’s about what you build together. This post walks through what integration should look like—and how ego and mistrust destroy potential before it even starts.
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Meetings are like goldfish—they grow to the size of their tank. If you give them an hour, they’ll take an hour. This post challenges default meeting durations and lays out a case for shorter, sharper, more effective conversations. Stop scheduling 60 minutes. Keep the goldfish in the tank.
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Most workplace emergencies aren’t emergencies. They’re just symptoms of poor prioritization and unclear expectations. This post breaks down how to define true emergencies and structure escalation before everything feels urgent.
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Flat orgs feel empowering—until they fall apart under their own weight. As companies grow, the nostalgia of early connection often gets in the way of the structure required to scale. This post uses a childhood toolset as a metaphor for why clinging to “flatness” is less about culture and more about control—and how SHIELD Illinois grew fast by adding structure, not red tape.
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When executives over-attend meetings, teams underperform. This post breaks down how leadership presence—when overdone—creates bottlenecks, erodes ownership, and signals a lack of trust. The best way to empower your team? Step out of the room.
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For our inaugural Ask An Entrepreneur, I spoke to my good friend Shannon Gail Clemonds owner/operator of Shannon Gail. Shannon Gail is a Chicago-based event planning firm producing 90+ weddings and events per year locally and across the United States. The team is comprised of a unique blend of business and event professionals with backgrounds in finance, marketing, design, venue management, hospitality, and catering and prides itself on being the go-to expert in all areas of event production. In its 10 years of business, the company has continued to set the bar for event management standards and has built an impressive resume of corporate and social clientele.
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You don’t need to go full hierarchy but adding a level of middle management will acknowledge the dynamics that are already present and make your organization more efficient. You can hold onto your principles and organizational culture while still providing a framework that adequately specifies delegated decision making throughout the organization.
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What are your strengths? What do you need to work on? What is the next pitch (opportunity) for your business? Will you be ready to knock it out of the park or will you foul it off? Do you know the answers to these questions or are you swinging blindly at whatever the pitcher throws? Competitive strategy is too important to leave to gut feeling, guess work, or good luck.
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Efficiency is only part of the equation when determining the effectiveness of a process. In fact, I submit, efficiency is the least important part of this equation. The ultimate determination of the effectiveness of a process improvement is how that improvement affects the competitive position of the firm.
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If you want to be the next Amazon, Apple, Intel, or Google the first thing you should do is disregard everything Amazon, Apple, Intel, and Uber except the fact that they followed no one. Throw out the mold. Break the barriers. Disregard the benchmarks. Ignore what you have read in every blog including this one. Forge a new path like the successful entrepreneurs before you. You can be the next great success story but only if you blaze your own trail.
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Simply put, companies evolve or die. If GE had maintained the same product line it started with when the company was known as Edison General Electric (i.e. Edison bulbs and direct current), the company would never have grown to become the multibillion-dollar multinational conglomerate it is now. However, like New Coke and Crystal Clear Pepsi, some changes are just not warranted.
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As a budget conscious business professional, I love to get a good deal for my company. If I can save $20/month by changing vendors--I’ll do it. No amount is too small. There is, however, one place I will never skimp—people.
Read MoreManagement does not equal leadership and leadership does not equal management. These two skills are as disparate as apples and oranges. Managing leaders must strive valiantly to maintain separation between the two and whenever possible, err on the side leadership.
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We have all been put in situations beyond our control. We have all experienced a time where our fate or the fate of our organization rested squarely in the hands of someone or something over which we had no influence or authority. However, in my experience, there is always something you can do to improve the situation for customers.
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Why surge pricing, aggressive recruitment practices, and competition with traditional livery services should be viewed not as unfair practices but rather as a sign that an innovative company is finally starting to shake-up an archaic market.
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Innovation gets you in the game. Strategy wins it. To keep your idea from becoming a commodity: Diversify. Differentiate. Dominate.
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Software companies accounted for 22.6% of Chicago's 38595% 3 year growth reported in the Inc5000 list released yesterday. IT services placed a distant second with 10.6% growth reported.
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