When working with consulting clients, I take my operating manual templates that I’ve created at my own company, and I help owners tweak them to become their own. The lesson is that it’s easier to edit than to create.

How about finding extra time during the holidays to stop and enjoy the season as a team, let alone finding extra time to be available for fun and family time? Not likely. But it doesn't have to be this way.

When you were a tech at someone else’s company, the customers loved you because you were the one tech who could actually fix things.

Improving sales goes a whole lot better when you’re prepared with a plan. To make quality sales, you need a documented, systematic approach and practice to be successful.

I’ve preached throughout the years that having objective standards, clear communicated goals, and known and practiced policies and procedures for everyone at the company is the best path for being fair. As people, we all want to feel we’ve been treated fairly, regardless if we’re getting a carrot or the stick as a reward or as a consequence.

My first marketing guru was Leo Baron. He taught me the ins and outs of marketing while I was still in my 20s. I was lucky to have access to such a proven marketing genius at such a young age. He had “street cred” from working with some of the top companies in the greater New York area. It was only because he and my dad had been boyhood friends that he decided to do my father a favor and mentor me.

Not being focused on actively retaining staff takes an awful toll on the company because it costs a lot of time, money, and energy to always be replacing people, especially really good people.

You can’t operate your company effectively if it’s run on talking or, just as badly, run by issuing one-way memos. One-way memos are the type you plaster all over the place, like: “Clean up the bathroom. Your mother doesn’t work here.” Only one question left, “Is this form of running your company working?” The answer is: probably not.

How do you know what’s the right thing to work on at the right time? You need to create a master project list. This is a giant list of all the projects and habits you need to work on at your company. Typically, when I do this work with clients, the first master project list is somewhere between 100-150 things.

What I discovered when implementing systems in my family’s plumbing, heating, and cooling business was that there weren’t really a million things to master. There were just seven. Seven “power” concepts that enabled me and my two brothers, the third generation in the company, to run it with a lot less stress and a whole lot more success.