My thoughts on business always start with MARKETING, MENTORING & MANAGEMENT….connecting PEOPLE, PROCESSES, PROJECTS & PERFORMANCE. Marketing via email is fine if you want your service to be perceived and priced as a commodity. Mentoring is a key for organizational growth. Young staff must feel that they have a chance to aspire up to their goals, or at least up to their capabilities. Management at ENGA, by Ed Genheimer, a great effective leader was, “Anyone who ever says that their project will be perfect is a liar! Good service providers will respond to problems with honesty and speed, to get things back on track.” If the service provider manages problems, and only delivers solutions, the client will never have any reason to look elsewhere. People; organizations that believe they can simply fire 10 this month and then when the workload (low because of ineffective marketing) rebounds can just get 10 more bodies on board…are clueless, and will never ever really achieve honest, reliable, repeatable success. Processes; a fine man, Bob ten Bosch, said “Quality is conformance to client requirements.” Processes should be in alignment with client expectations. Projects; one of my best ever clients, a University of Toledo VP, a brilliant and charismatic engineer, would continually challenge everyone. He would simply state “Here is the scope, fee and total project cost. I have no contingency. Figure it out.” Of course there was not enough money and time to “properly” do it, but we always did, and ended up with great results making the team stronger, more responsive, and much better. Performance is linked to attitude. You can teach or train almost anyone how to do objective things, but you can’t really change someone’s attitude. The old adage, “your attitude determines your altitude” is true. Gifted strangers will not be able to outperform a team of decent, average folks all pulling together.