Hey 🙂 We’re coming to the end of a quarter, and I think this is a timely reminder for all of us, me included, to lift our heads up. Not just to look at the week, but at the next 12 weeks. It’s easy to glance at the calendar and think, “Right, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s… we’ll get there.” And...

Hey 🙂 I have goals I care about. I believe hitting them will mean something for me, for the business, for the brand, and for the team. But caring about a goal and doing what it takes to reach it are two different things. So here’s the honest list of what I need more of right now. More urgency. I’m...

Hey 🙂 One of the most common things I write down, especially when there seems to be a lot to do, is to ask the question: “What’s the next right thing to do?” I’ve shortened that to NRT (next right thing). There are a lot of days when I run out of steam, energy, focus, motivation, or gumption. I look...

Hey 🙂 I keep coming back to this thought. It’s become such an important idea that I write it down almost every day, to remind myself to do the right thing: prioritise team performance over individual performance. It’s a reminder of what my job actually is — to help other people do their best work, to work through people, and...

Hey 🙂 There’s something important about your ability to start things without finishing them the same day. To be comfortable in the messy middle of project management — lots of things started, nothing quite finished yet. This came to me because we wrapped up a task that took three weeks to get done. Not because anyone was lazy or procrastinating...

Hey 🙂 We’re right in the middle of building out and launching a new group coaching program for sales reps. It’s like building a business within a business. As I’ve been building this out, I’ve also been building a set of standards that are helping me to do the right things. I took these standards and wrote them down on...

Hey 🙂 Spencer’s heading into Senior Prep this year — the last stop before high school — and with it comes a gear shift: more subjects, more work, more homework. On one of our date nights, I asked him how he was feeling about the year ahead. True to form, Spencer takes most things in his stride. But homework was...

Hey 🙂 I recently had the chance to work with a leadership team at an agency — four team sessions, one a month, over about four months. Four hours of coaching in total. The theme running through all of it was simple: how do you do your best work? Not how do you do more — almost the opposite. How...

Hey 🙂 I’m not interested in the 9-to-5. I’m not interested in working 50, 60, 70, 80-hour weeks. I’m not interested in being busy. What I am interested in: being effective. Doing my best work over a long period of time. Doing work that fascinates me. That requires a different way of thinking. Here are some of the things I...

Hey 🙂 Here’s the model I use, and it’s dead simple on purpose. I look at the business as three departments: demand, sales, delivery. That’s it. How do we get customers. How do we convert them into clients. How do we deliver a world-class product or service once they’re in. Everything sits in one of those three buckets. The illusion...

Hey 🙂 I saw something on Instagram today. An author talking about his mantra — he’s got a neon sign in his office that says “This is not the cake.” The idea: it’s dangerous for him, and for all of us, to compare our ingredients to someone else’s cake. Don’t compare your flour and eggs — the mess you’re still...

Hey 🙂 This week I launched something I’ve been building towards for a while now. One of our big goals at The Question First Group this year — and honestly for the next three to five years — is to build a world-class group coaching program. We’ve mainly been a private coaching company up to now, and if we want...