The SBA tells us 50% of businesses fail in five years, but my experience is only about 1% (or less) actually fail due to outside circumstances. The other 49% experience something that was entirely avoidable. If you ask small business owners why they might go out of business, they will tell you they need a…

On average, business owners work 55 hours per week, take very few vacations and do business while there. Most of us are working relentleslly, always hoping that we’ll some how get to a new level next year and begin to reap some personal rewards from our business. But we don’t even know what “level” we’re…

It’s easy to spend thirty years of ups and downs, peaks and valleys, scarcity and abundance, always reacting to the good or bad times that seem to be happening to us, not because of us.  Because we feel dragged along by our business, we can’t wait to sell it some fool who will do it…

How did one business owner move from working 55 hours a week to working 16 hours a week and make exponentially more personal income? 95% of business owners find out at some point that they have built themselves a job and are hostages to their businesses. How do we build a Mature Business that regularly…

Instead of separating the “strategic” and the “tactical”, or the “long-term” vs. the “short-term”, we need to see how to use every activity in our business to do both, and the better we get at this, the faster our business will grow up and make money when we’re not there. This podcast gives multiple examples…

Being wealthy or rich are vastly different things. Many, if not most people who are rich live in unimaginable poverty when it comes to free time. We pursue money because we think it will give us freedom, but freedom in our business is not a function of how much money the business is making. In…

There are Two Opposing Forces in Life and in Business we are faced with every morning before we even get out of bed; the Tyranny of the Urgent and the Priority of the Important. The Tryanny of the Urgent is like a three-year old, relentlessly pulling on us, demanding our attention, yelling at us to…

In the latest episode of the “Get Off The Treadmill” podcast, host Chuck Blakeman chats with Clayton Achen, founder of Achen Henderson, a cutting-edge virtual CPA firm. Clayton, a passionate advocate for small businesses, shares his unique journey from a sales career to becoming a significant force in accounting, focusing on tax, cloud accounting, and…

Do you want freedom IN your business, not from it? We can get there using three Big Ideas for small business owners: The Four Building Blocks – the four essentials for getting started, and keeping it all going. Small Business Marketing and Sales – the radical difference between what giant corporations and guru books tell…