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Joel Kelly

Marketer. Writer. Loved by all.

There’s no such thing as a riskless strategy

If you want things to change, you have to try to change things, and that entails assuming the risk that things might not go the way you want. Every plan is a guess about the future, and sometimes our guesses are wrong.

On being busy, but broke

It’s a dangerous myth that struggling businesses just need more customers. In my experience, many businesses aren’t struggling because they don’t have enough customers, they struggle because they have too many customers. Or too many of the wrong customers. They’ve become busy, but broke.

Patient for growth, impatient for profit

If you’re too patient for profit, focusing on growth alone—which is a common problem in modern business—you’ll wait too long to find out if anyone actually wants to spend money on your product.

Focus on the most likely outcomes

It’s easy to panic and imagine the worst-case scenarios for any project we embark on. And it’s just as easy to fantasize about the very best outcomes. But it’s a little more difficult, yet profoundly more important, to analyze the most likely best and worst cases.

You’ve already hit the iceberg

A common mistake when things go wrong is to spend time thinking about how they could have gone. Or how we’d hoped things would turn out.

If this then that, and if that, then what?

Everyone who knows me well knows there’s one rule I live by. They know it because I’m always saying it. So often it’s probably their least favorite phrase. But I’ll keep saying it: If this then that, and if that, then what?

Not deciding is still deciding

“The two biggest dangers in decision making are not making enough decisions and then not correcting the bad ones.”— David C. Baker