Sep 17, 2026 | Start A Business
Most turnaround stories skip the hardest part. They tell you what the company pivoted from and what it pivoted to, and they leave out the months in between when the old business was still paying the bills, the new one wasn’t paying anything, and the founder was...
Sep 17, 2026 | Start A Business
In the 1880s, David McConnell sold books door to door in upstate New York. It was hard work with a low hit rate, and he needed something to get past the front door. So he started offering a small vial of perfume, which he made himself, as a thank-you to any woman who...
Sep 17, 2026 | Start A Business
In 1902, five businessmen in Two Harbors, Minnesota, put their money into a mining operation. The plan was straightforward: dig up corundum, the hard mineral used in grinding wheels, and sell it to manufacturers. They called the company Minnesota Mining and...
Sep 16, 2026 | Gig Economy
Treat regular contact with other people who do what you do as operating infrastructure, not a social nicety, and schedule it the way you’d schedule anything else the business depends on. When you left the workplace, you left some things gladly: the meetings, the...
Sep 16, 2026 | Gig Economy
Build an external stop signal into your day, because the one thing a solo operator never gets is someone else deciding that work is over. Ask an employee when their workday ends and they’ll tell you a time. Ask a solo operator and you’ll get a pause....
Sep 16, 2026 | Gig Economy
Decide now, while you’re healthy, exactly what happens to your business on a day you can’t work, so that being sick never turns into a business decision. Every employed person gets sick days. Not because their employer is generous, but because someone...
Sep 15, 2026 | Gig Economy
Every quarter, write a short, specific message to clients you haven’t worked with in a year or more, with one reason to talk now. Somewhere in your records is a list of people who already did the hardest thing a customer can do: they trusted you with money once....
Sep 15, 2026 | Gig Economy
Decide now what a rush costs, put it on every quote and in every agreement, and let the fee do the talking when the emergency arrives. It’s Thursday afternoon. A client needs it by Monday. Your weekend was going to be a weekend. And now you’re in the worst...
Sep 15, 2026 | Gig Economy
Every quote goes out with two options, a solid version and a fuller one, so the client’s question changes from “should I?” to “which one?” A single price is a yes-or-no question, and you’ve handed the client the “no.”...
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