"I'm so busy!" As summer (for many of us) winds down and conference season and Q4 ramps up, this mantra will echo louder and louder.  We trade stories of miles flown, cities visited, sleepless nights counted, deals saved, speeches given. The tally of these items becomes a proxy score for our value as an employee, our stature as a professional. “She must have a very important job,” we think, “she is always so busy!”  We’ve come to equate busyness with professional status and we’ve come to equate professional status with self-identity. That combination equates to… burnout.

September marks the beginning of the Q3/4 trade show season. Even if you’ve already read our previous post on this subject, it deserves revisiting before you hit the road with a big event investment.

Running an agency, regardless of the type, requires grit, determination, some serious smarts and of course, persistence. Without these ingredients, you will do well to survive, let alone thrive. But what if your ambitions are loftier than simply survival or running a lifestyle business? What if you want to grow your agency and achieve some scale so that you can exit with a high valuation?  That's a challenge that a lot of agency owners tackle and with varying degrees of success.

Innovation tops the list of business buzzwords right now, especially in the data and analytics space. Everyone wants to be INNOVATIVE. GreenBook’s recently published annual list of most innovative companies spurred discussions about what makes a company innovative and how innovation seems to thrive among some companies and die amongst others. These discussions were also heard earlier this year at the Front End of Innovation Conference where major corporations, government agencies and start-ups came together to figure out how to fuel innovation in their respective sectors. Across the discussions, a few consistent themes emerged:

Burning the busy badge of honor promotes a better work environment and it has an added benefit…supporting your success. Warren Buffet is famous for advising, "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything." Buffet isn’t the only (highly) successful individual to support the art of saying “no” more often. Steve Jobs, Tim Ferriss, Jim Collins and even Oprah have all gone on the record with similar points of view. So why don’t more of us listen to their advice? Why do we continue to accept more commitments, driving ourselves to the brink of burnout?

Summer is the perfect time to step back and focus on your business instead of being mired in your business, ensuring you're ready to hit the fall ramp up in full-force. To help you succeed, we’re launching our series of Masterminds aimed at supporting key business areas including sales and marketing, product development and leadership and culture.

Invariably there are a few “holiday” months out of every year where business slows and you have a chance to catch your breath. 

Are you dreaming of your summer break? Counting down to unplugging from it all? What if we worked in companies we didn’t need to take a summer vacation or holiday from? What if we didn’t push ourselves to the brink of mental exhaustion with the expectation we’d be able to recharge over a long weekend or a week off? If we are physically unable to work (i.e., illness, injury) the expectation is we’ll log off for the day or until we’re well enough to work. But what if it’s our mental wellness that’s out of whack? What are the expectations then?

In any discussion about team building these days, the D-word is sure to come up… diversity.

A growing number of studies show that diversity isn’t just the right thing to do from a people perspective, it’s also the right thing to do for a company’s bottom line. According to BCG, diverse companies report 19% higher revenue rates. Forbes reported diverse companies are 1.4 times more likely to have sustained profitable growth. The key to realizing those benefits is ensuring you’re addressing diversity holistically and not equating it to inherent traits only.