Anything You Want

Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. Pay close attention to when you’re being the real you and when you’re trying to impress an invisible jury.

None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding. They want you to keep your attention focused on them. It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

But no matter what business you’re in, it’s good to prepare for what would happen if business doubled. Have ten clients now? How would it look if you had twenty at once? Serving eighty customers for lunch each day? What would happen if 160 showed up? Notice that “more of the same” is never the answer. You’d have to do things in a new way to handle

Starting with no money is an advantage. You don’t need money to start helping people.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

Your business plan is moot. You don’t know what people really want until you start doing it.

Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a big boring company. Over ten years, it seemed like every time someone raved about how much he loved CD Baby, it was because of one of these little fun human touches.

The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy.

Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.