You may have experienced this pattern before. You start a brand new job and work extremely hard in the beginning to establish yourself and your reputation. At first, the nature of the work is extremely challenging. You are constantly learning and trying to keep up with your coworkers. You find yourself staying late at the office just to get by.

As time passes however, you become adept at your job. You find ways to do your work faster and more efficiently. You become proficient and an expert at what you do. As more time passes, you feel comfortable and at ease with your job. You find yourself able to finish all of your work in an 8 hour day. You have more free time to spend at home. Things become cushy. Is it time to leave?

Photo by Just …

This particular reader was feeling a bit discouraged about her situation so I thought that I would try to lend a few words of encouragement. A, Thank you for emailing me. This post is for you.

I have been following your blog for about 3 months now, I work retail so I absolutely love the customer stories(I can relate). I have been working on starting my own business (it is very hands on in that includes sewing and screen printng) both of which I love. So much so that this has actually lead me back to school, and I know exactly what I wish to do. However I keep butting my head against the wall, now thanks to you I understand BHAG and have been working accordingly.

However I still get those nagging, you should be happy to have a job, you’re a bit old to start(really I’m 35!), you …

I’m proud to announce that our online store Bumblebee Linens is featured in this month’s July/August issue of Brides magazine. Being included in this major publication not only lends credibility to our business but it also exposes our store to millions of potential customers as well!

For those of you who are curious, we were contacted out of the blue by Brides magazine several months back because they wanted to feature some of our linens in their magazine. Turns out that giving linens away as wedding favors is the latest trend! So we shipped them whatever products they wanted to see and felt very honored to have our items chosen to grace the pages of their magazine.

Needless to say, my wife and I feel very lucky to have gotten the attention of Brides magazine. In a previous article entitled Starting Your Own Business: How To Improve …

I’m not sure why, but lately I’ve been listening to a lot of people bitch about their jobs. And honestly, I’m getting a little tired of it. “I hate going to work, but I gotta to pay the bills somehow.” “I want to change jobs, but I’m afraid of getting laid off.” The complaint I hate hearing the most is “I feel lucky just to have a job in this down economy so I’d better stay put”.

Personally, I think “feeling lucky” is the wrong attitude to have. Your company should feel lucky to have you as an employee. Currently, one of my friends who is feeling “lucky” is getting taken advantage of by his employer. He’s worked weekends for quite a while now and even had to work over Memorial Day weekend. In addition, his company announced that there would be …

Sometimes a seemingly insignificant change to your website or online strategy can pay huge dividends. And in many cases, the answer to improving sales requires very little effort to implement.

In this article, I’m going to discuss the slight tweaks and minute changes that we made to our website that had a dramatic impact on our business.

Before I get into the guts of what we did, I just want to stress the importance of obtaining quality metrics for your website. It is especially vital that you accurately track the way a customer navigates through your online store. Do they leave your website from a particular page? Are they having problems finding a particular product?

Photo by Gare and Kitty

As long as you periodically evaluate how your customer interacts with your products and website, you can usually spot and make changes to allow them to find your products …

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from starting our online wedding linens business, it’s that good planning can only get you so far. You can spend hours and hours putting together the most intricate and well thought out plan only to have it blow up in your face because of one false assumption.

In order to be successful, you have to be open minded. You have to be willing to change. You have to accept that your plans might be complete garbage and that you need to start over from scratch.

Photo by dotbenjamin

Looking back, my wife and I had a ton of things that didn’t go according to plan. Come to think of it, if we had proceeded down the path of our well laid out plans, my wife would still be working right now and this blog probably never would have existed.

Recently, my wife …