Joel Kelly

“You can make people feel guilty enough to do something,” advertising legend Howard Gossage once wrote, “but you can’t make them enjoy it. As a matter of fact, you can make them positively unenjoy it.” Many business owners positively unenjoy doing their own marketing.

"There’s only one thing you can count on...On any given moment in any given day, somebody somewhere is screwing up."

There’s a dangerous pressure in business. The pressure to have more and more products, so we can capture more of the market. To further and further expand our target market, so we can appeal to everyone. Or to provide more and more services, so we can do more work with our current customers.

Building a sustainably profitable business is a bit easier, and a lot more likely, when you couple that drive with a strong strategy.

Successful strategy requires being different. When you focus on what everyone else is doing, when you try to fit too well into your industry, you become more and more like everyone else—with less and less for a customer to base a choice on other than price.

Unless we have an external accountability, if there’s something we should do but don’t want to do, chances are we won’t do it. At least not for long.