Cindy will be the featured speaker at the Rotary Club of Tysons' Corner on June 6th!

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May 21 2013

Getting Your First Business Loan

I’ve been fortunate enough to teach a couple of classes at Walter Reed through the 100 Entrepreneurs Project.  The program provides valuable information and visits from real business owners to wounded veterans who want to start their own business.  Needless to say, financing is often top of mind.  

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May 16 2013

The Real Art to the Sales Pitch

If I had a dime for every boring power point presentation I’ve had to sit through I’d have retired a long time ago.  Bankers are in love with “decks” and love to show their prospects and customers how special they are through the use of the written word (or charts and graphs).

 

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May 09 2013

The Importance of Checking References

Every year, I have at least 3 or 4 people call to ask if I’ll be a reference.  Only about a third of the people actually call me.  And when they do, they don’t ask very insightful questions.  A recent  Globe & Mail  article does a great job of phrasing questions in such a way that you're really going to get at what your candidate was really like.

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Apr 30 2013

4 Tips to Landing Your First Management Role

QUESTION: My manager announced she’s retiring this fall and feels I’m ready to step into her job. She encouraged me to apply for her job. So far, the initial interviewing process has gone well.  I have a second round of interviews coming up and I anticipate that one of their concerns may be that I’ve never managed people before.

   

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Apr 23 2013

7 Steps to Hiring Your First Employee

For a lot of solopreneurs like myself, one of the hardest decisions you make is when and how to hire your first employee. From an economic perspective, the right time is when you either can’t outsource the work you need done or the cost of outsourcing now exceeds the cost of hiring.  

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Apr 16 2013

The "To Do" List Every Boss Should Have

People like lists. It helps to summarize the complexity of life. You don’t have to listen to all the music out there because iTunes or Amazon gives you the top 10 or 50 downloads, movies or books.  And there are thousands of lists of what managers and entrepreneurs should and shouldn’t do every day and now even on the weekends. 

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Apr 09 2013

3 Reasons Private Companies Need to be Transparent

Over the years, I worked with a lot of small, privately owned companies.  After awhile, you get a sense of the companies that seem to get it right and the ones that never do.  Of course, much goes into making a successful company, but I would argue that the culture is at the top of the list. 

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Apr 02 2013

Bad Employees Never Quit!

I had to laugh when I read the recent article in the WSJ that validated what I learned years ago.  Bad employees are happy employees. In over 40% of the companies they surveyed, low performers were found to be more engaged and enjoyed working for their companies more than middle and high performers.  Why wouldn’t they be?

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