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If you do any amount of business travel, you'll want to listen to this podcast.  With nearly a million flight miles between the two of us, we uncover travel tips and tricks (and hilarious stories) that could only come from experience.  In it, we discuss how to get the most out of business travel, how to maximize the value of your time, tips and hacks to make travel more enjoyable, and what to do when things go wrong.

In this podcast, Modern da Vinci expert and business owner Seth Sinclair talks about how difficult it is for small businesses to succeed, how anxiety and stress build when business plans don’t pan out as expected, and how financial and other pressures can lead business owners to give up.  He shares a personal and recent story about persisting through these challenges over a two-year period to finally achieve a foundation of success. 

Consistently hiring A-players is one of the most challenging aspects of running a business. Far too often, our hiring process is either non-existent or hasn’t been given a lot of thought. Fletcher Wimbush from The Hire Talent is here to help us change that. In this interview, Fletcher shows us (with over 30 years of experience) how hire and recruit top talent. We talked for nearly an hour, and discussed dozens of amazing insights any business owner can use consistently hire A-players. Use these tips to begin getting the right people on the bus and build a team that gets results.  

Oh, the dreaded performance review process. You either hate it, or you hate it. Am I right? It’s not that you think they’re unnecessary… After all. Even if you don’t give performance reviews now, somewhere in the back of your mind, you know you should. It’s that they take time out of work, cause unnecessary stress, and don’t seem to be very effective at changing employee behavior. And isn’t changing behavior for the better the whole point? So, should we just ditch them all together? My answer to that is a resounding “NO!” When done properly, performance reviews can be a welcome source of feedback for your employees. They can lead to deeper discussions about responsibilities, career goals, and organizational improvements. So instead of throwing them out, let’s implement 3 simple tips to get them right.

If there's one thing that makes business owners anxious, it's networking. Some would describe it as difficult, others stressful. However, the importance of it cannot be understated. Business networking can lead to partnerships, sales, and future contacts that can help you (and you them) in unforeseen ways. It's a necessity for any business owner, and if you do it wrong, you'll miss countless opportunities.  So how does someone (like me) who is anxious about networking with other professionals push through? 

Today we draw from the insanely popular business book, Blue Ocean Strategy, to help you create a unique value proposition that gets you out of those bloody competitive waters (where you struggle to get business) and instead sets you on a path towards a wide blue ocean full of customers who are ready and willing to pay for the unique products and services your company has to offer. If you are fighting your competition… If your customers don’t understand what is valuable about your offerings… We’ll use this simple methodology to find a set of values that truly differentiate your products and services. We’ll also help you see where you can create new value so your products and services are unique, sought after, and highly desirable.

You need your business to be successful. If your business fails, you won’t be able to earn a living and provide for yourself, your family, or your employees. If you don’t have money, you can’t buy food and shelter. And if you don’t have food and shelter, you die! Sound a little extreme? Maybe, but to a large extent, it’s true. Your business is your livelihood. You can always try to find another job if things go wrong, but that would mean your business failed. This is the pressure that many small business owners feel each day, and we’re here to help you change that feeling. Instead of worrying about what the future holds, we want to build your confidence in your business. We want to give you a clear path to achieving your goals. And what we’re about to cover in this post will give you exactly what you need to focus on to make that happen.

It's mind-boggling, isn't it? You have a great meeting with a potential customer. Your presentation is on point. You answer all their questions. And they show all the buying signs. Before leaving, you end with a hearty handshake and promise to send more information. Only when you do, they don't respond. You leave them a friendly voicemail. You shoot them another email. You remind them about your great meeting. And what do you get in return? Nothing. You follow up again. You ask them to call you back. You try anything to get them respond. And what do you get? Silence. At some point, you give up... figuring your prospect was never interested to begin with. Enough with them. On to the next client. Sound familiar? It's happened to me dozens of times. Unfortunately, I learned later, I had left dozens of sales on the table. There's good news, though. With one simple technique, you can drastically increase the number of silent prospects that return your calls. Case in point, when I implemented this technique, my response rate increased by over 60%!

Can you describe the difference between teamwork and team building? Do you know the three factors to creating an effective team building event? How do you apply vulnerability-based trust into your leadership and management goals to bring out the most productive, effective, and excited staff? These questions aren't for the feint of heart, and often take years to understand and execute. Unless you're a Professional team builder like James Bennett of Firefly Events. James runs a small business to build team productivity, camaraderie, and effectiveness through planned events and outings. His experience is incredibly deep, and the list of companies he's worked with is impressive, to say the least. In our interview with James, we uncover some of his secrets to building strong teams, tips for dealing with toxic employees, and influential books that have helped businesses of all sizes develop an effective and energetic staff.

You know what's coming... At the end of today, you'll either feel a sense of accomplishment, or like you've wasted another day. It's not that you didn't work hard. You answered emails. You took phone calls. You attended meetings. You made decisions. But for some reason you got nothing done. Well, that's not true. You got a lot of other people's work done, just not your own. You've made little progress toward your goals. You've been running around solving other people's problems. You've been answering other people's questions, and spending time in other people's meetings. In other words, you've been working on urgent, but not important tasks. There's a solution to this problem. A way to move closer to your goals every day.

If you’re heading into 2017 thinking about setting new plans and goals for your business, Modern da Vinci is here to help. In this brief video, we cover: three big planning mistakes that you must avoid, and the first step you should take to set the foundation for your planning process. This is the first video in a series where we will lay out a specific approach for creating a simple, clear, and impactful plan to help you set (and reach) your goals in 2017. And beyond.

This isn’t “yet another productivity tip.” This is a way to organize your learning, clean up your computer, educate yourself using spare moments in your day (like driving), and literally read your news and articles twice as fast as you can today. Superhuman. Productivity. Let’s get focused. Let’s get productive. Let’s stop procrastinating. And let’s download an app to help.

Many small and medium-sized business owners kick the can down the road when it comes to financial planning. That’s understandable since business owners are preoccupied with short-term responsibilities and dealing with fires that inevitably pop up daily. Unfortunately, this leaves the business owner and his or her partners and family members exposed to tremendous risk. What happens if conditions change and the business fails? How will the business respond if a partner falls ill? What is the business exposed to as the market fluctuates? How can the business be financially responsible while offering competitive compensation and benefits to employees? In this interview, business finance expert Blake Fellows explains why it is essential for business owners to be proactive about setting goals, determining ranges for spending and saving, ensuring that foundational agreements are in place, and having specialized support in all aspects of financial planning.

When a conflict arises, most people have a default approach for how they handle the situation. Many of us are not conscious of our conflict style; we respond automatically without giving thought to the circumstances. This is significant in the context of negotiations. A negotiation is a type of conflict – a situation where your concerns and interests are not aligning with those of another person, and you are actively seeking a solution. Understanding your tendencies in responding to conflict, and how you may need to adjust them, will give you an advantage as you work through a negotiation. If you can assess each conflict and negotiation situationally, you can intentionally utilize the style that will be most beneficial to you.

So far in this series, we have explored several common mistakes that can harm negotiations as well as tactics you can employ to avoid negotiation pitfalls. This post is about re-framing the way we view negotiations, especially regarding how we look at the “other side” that we are negotiating with. The idea is to achieve a satisfactory result without damaging relationships.

Negotiations can be tough. They are often high pressure, high stakes situations with tight deadlines and demanding stakeholders. Opinions and interests can differ widely among parties, and strong emotions may come into play. When we are under this type of pressure, we often find ourselves stumped. Our thinking narrows and our creative muscles feel constrained. The Principled Negotiation Method defined in Getting to Yes suggests several strategies to counteract this. The premise is that “The key to wise decision making lies in selecting from a great number and variety of options.”

Preparation is essential to effective negotiation. If you wish to reach a fair and satisfactory deal, you need to enter the negotiation with a clear understanding of your interests, options, comparative data, and objective criteria. One of the most important data points to consider is your “Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement”. This serves as your “Plan B” to the negotiation. In other words, it is the best option you have and the one you will live with should you leave the negotiation without an agreement. If you don’t know your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, you may end up taking a deal that is worse than your backup option, or you may walk away from a deal that is better than your backup option. In this podcast, we will give you some simple steps to create your best alternative to a negotiated agreement and use an example to drive the point home.

Negotiation is a back-and-forth communication that is designed to reach an agreement among parties that have both shared and differing interests. We all deal with negotiating each day, whether on simple matters like what to eat for dinner to complex decisions involving high stakes business matters with multiple parties. The purpose of negotiations is to produce wise agreements as efficiently as possible while maintaining or strengthening relationships. In this brief podcast, we specifically look at what “Interests” are, and what it means to focus on interests (not positions) to get better results from your negotiations.

In this interview with Salomon Paredes of E2 Outlook, we uncover some hidden truths about why website development and social media management is difficult, and discuss the purpose of each for small business owners.

Glen Hellman is a business expert and strategist that writes and presents on the topic of “How To Pitch to the Reptilian Brain.” It’s an approach grounded in neuroscience that is designed to influence others and move them to action. In this interview, Glen shares his insights on how to use these principles to sharpen your business’s sales pitch and how they can improve your leadership and business in general.