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Knowing Where to Focus

Knowing Where to Focus

One of the most important aspects of being an expert is knowing what to focus on. For example, we hired an excellent dog trainer a few months ago. Now, I grew up with dogs all of my life and there are only a couple of years in the past 45 that I have not had a dog, and often more than one at a time. So, I know quite a bit about dogs. However, the dog trainer was at our home for less than 20 minutes and he pointed out three things we were doing wrong with our German shepherd t

“Sometimes, I wish I had not learned that”

“Sometimes, I wish I had not learned that”

A week or so ago, I was talking with my 11-year-old son about what I was learning in The Plant Paradox. It has a pretty extensive description of the ways our food production industry and personal care products are having a negative impact on our health. He was very interested as he likes biology and cares a lot about health. After taking it all in for a day or so, he said: “Sometimes, I wish I had not learned that.” And I know what he meant. The information can be overwhelmin

Finding your “magic bullet”

Finding your “magic bullet”

A lot of business people I meet are looking for the “magic bullet” that will change their business. They want to find the one social media tactic, the one advertising platform, or the one referral partner that can dramatically increase their business. And that is what people like to talk about: how John figured out Facebook and grew his business by 250% in one year. However, that is not the reality that I have seen working for businesses. As the saying goes, “He worked 10 lon

The Problem with Marketing Automation

The Problem with Marketing Automation

If you listen to the messages from most marketing automation companies (from email automation to optimizing pay-per-click results), you would think that automation makes things simple and easy to get better results. I disagree! And based on the discussion we had a couple of weeks ago in my mastermind group, other experienced marketers don’t see marketing automation as an easy solution either. Yes, they can be helpful, but only if you have the marketing fundamentals in place.

Perfection is the Enemy of Progress

Perfection is the Enemy of Progress

For the past several months, I have been wanting to upgrade the Factor Four website. As I have adjusted our marketing messaging over the last six months, what I tell people is not aligned with what is says on the website. Once I actually set a deadline for doing the project, it took just a week to get most of it updated including migrating to a new platform for the site. However, that was when I hit a wall. There were two things that required more work: a graphic on the front