Business owners: you can make your Controller a contributor to the success of your business During my consultations with business leaders, I am often struck by the restrictions they have placed on their Controllers because of management’s limited expectations of this finance role. For this purpose, I am using the title Controller generically, to reflect any role that is the head of the [...]

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Most presidents and executive management I work with are, quite rightly, focused on the big picture. When working with these clients, I am often struck by the aspects of their personal work habits that are a huge determinant of their productivity and value. Every manager would agree that having a few more hours in the day would be beneficial, but they appear to be unaware that they’re missing [...]

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April 2020 and we are living in crazy times. Locked away in our homes, many of us not able to work. So what will the future of Small Business look like when we emerge from our COVID-19 internment. Brent Kobayashi of Kobayashi + Zeitguys interviews Neville Pokroy, President of Mastermind Solutions, and together they muse about what the world of business and marketing during and after the [...]

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I am often amazed how few people strive for differentiation in order to get their products or services noticed. More often than not they feel that if they just say "here I am" that they will be noticed. Imagine your friend is in a stadium full of people (you don't have a phone to call to each other - yes, I said imagine!) and you need to connect to sit in the same place. When you arrive to [...]

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Welcome to the best business growth book Video endorsement of the book by a New York Times Top 10 Best Selling Author. Welcome to the start of an explosive future for you and your business. Welcome to Big Bang for Business. With this book, you will find out how a simple adjustment in your approach to Marketing and Business Growth can lead to a Big Bang for your Business. Best [...]

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Our goal at Mastermind is not to sell a specific product or service. It is, in fact, to create happy and content clients who, with our help, achieve their goals. What this means is that we don't blindly do what clients ask us to do. We question and challenge what may have been seen by the client as the only way to move forward, and by doing that we help clients become true leaders in their [...]

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There was a time that businesses could operate successfully on a whim.  Without data or knowledge.  Just put out a product or service and people will buy.  No strategy. No plan. No understanding of what was happening around them.  Ohhh, those were the days.... Or were they? Those days feel so long ago that most of us old enough have already forgotten about them.  And the younger generation[...]

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Conversely, what good is the balloon without hot air? It’s a lot like your people if they can’t or won’t implement an organization’s strategy? A business will not maximize its value if it doesn’t have a meaningful strategy and the right people organized to execute it. Planning to sell your business? Most owners want to believe that they are getting the most out of their business; [...]

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I was doing some research recently on why companies fail, as well as why companies don't grow.  It struck me after reading a number of opinions and viewpoints that there were indeed some common themes between these two situations.  While that did not surprise me, the common themes were quite striking, as was the one factor that applied to non-growing companies only. Success and failure have [...]

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Tom Dalton (not his real name) ran a very successful distribution business.  He had been in business for 42 years and the business had been successful for a long time.  He has seen the ebbs and flows of the economic roller coaster, so it is not new to him.  For the last two years, business had been expanding quite aggressively, albeit with only two customers.  Both these customers were [...]

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