The Learn Center
Resources for a more fulfilling life in business and beyond.
Grow Your Business Without Adding Overhead
Can you grow your business without adding overhead? Most owners I talk to aren’t sure, and the numbers show why. In a spring 2026 survey of 237 small business owners, Small Business Majority ↗ (opens…
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Can you grow your business without adding overhead? Most owners I talk to aren’t sure, and the…
When one of his key employees left, a client of mine in Silicon Valley asked her two direct…
When was the last time you asked one of your managers how they’re doing? Skip the department for a…
Here’s a question worth asking yourself if retirement is anywhere on your horizon. If your business…
Let me ask you the question I’ve been putting to owners all year. When AI takes over part of…
Walk into your operations department and ask what they think of your salespeople. Then walk over to…
Who is the one person in your business you would least want to lose? Now a harder question: do you…
Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath belongs on this list because it explains why organizational…
Pull out your own last performance review and look at what’s written on it. If the answer is a…
For much of my life, I believed freedom was the goal. Like many people, I imagined that if I had…
What percentage of last year’s revenue came from your single biggest customer? If you have to go…
A few years ago I sat down with a business owner who walked me around his office, introducing every…
When was the last time you sat down with the person who isn’t hitting the mark and asked what’s…
When was the last time you told someone the whole truth about how the business is really doing? Not…
Will Guidara ran the dining room that helped turn a good restaurant into the best in the world, and…
Ask yourself something before you read another word: do you know which AI tools your team used this…
Let me ask you the same question I ask every new client, before we get anywhere near an org chart:…
Why did that last open role go to someone from outside instead of the person already sitting two…
How long does your management meeting actually run? Be honest, because I already know the answer…
Could you tell me, right now, the two or three choices that decide where your business competes and…
Most owners I talk to assume their business stalled because sales dried up. That's almost never…
Nearly a third of U.S. companies now require a full return to the office, five days a week, and new…
Ask a small business owner whether they should delegate more and nearly all of them agree without…
Sleep tracking has turned rest into something people keep score on. Rings, watches and bedside…
Half of American workers now use artificial intelligence in their jobs, and most of them use it for…
Every founder eventually discovers that the organization they imagined and the organization they…
There is a form of conflict avoidance that wears a Christian face. You don't want to embarrass…
A bad hire is usually a failure of the hiring process, not bad luck with people, and that claim is…
We often imagine that if we could solve enough problems, we would finally arrive at peace.
The most recent federal labor data reads like good news for any owner who spent 2022 replacing…
A few weeks ago, I published an essay called The Freedom to Ask Why. It was a reflection on a…
A Gallup study released in November 2025 puts a number on something most business owners never…
I have been asking “why” for as long as I can remember.
Hybrid work stopped being a pandemic-era experiment years ago. Gallup's most recent workforce data…
The average manager in the United States is now responsible for more people than at any point since…
A new Barna Group study, produced in partnership with C12 Business Forums, surveyed 356 U.S. CEOs…
Most owners think about job clarity as something one person needs: does this employee understand…
SHRM's newest read on the American workplace, released in January 2026, describes something more…
Most businesses already track more numbers than anyone uses. Revenue, retention, output, whatever…
"The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups," by journalist Daniel Coyle, opens with…
PwC's Trust in US Business Survey found a gap most business owners never see, because it's…
"Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI," by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, opens from an…
Most small business owners either skip the exit interview altogether or treat it as a formality: a…
A little over a year after "quiet quitting" entered the business vocabulary, workplace researchers…
Ask most owners what keeps an employee from quitting and the answer defaults to pay. The research…
Most owners assume they'd know if they were burned out. In practice, the signal is easy to miss,…
Owning a business that operates from home erases a boundary employees still have by default: the…
The employee who gets promoted into management is usually the one who was best at the job before…
Most owners can name their most trusted employee without hesitation. Far fewer can say what happens…
Most people, asked what would make them happier, reach for some version of more: more money, more…
Fulfillment is easy to treat as a single feeling, the sense that life is going well, but the…
The customer service tasks AI already handles well are more specific than the marketing around "AI…
Most owners assume raising prices means losing customers to a competitor who won't. The data from…
New hires don't wait long to decide whether they made the right call. Onboarding research compiled…
The riskiest tasks to hand to AI right now aren't the obviously sensitive ones; they're the…
The instinct to lead by having the answer ready is understandable, and it's also usually backward.…
"Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win," by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, opens with…
"Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business," by Gino Wickman, introduced what's become one of the most…
"This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See," by Seth Godin, reframes marketing…
A high-volume auto repair, tire, and custom wheel dealer, fifty employees strong under the same…
A commercial refrigeration company, under the same ownership for two decades, had a strong…
A well-established counseling and therapy organization, more than 25 employees deep and profitable…
Most of what gets marketed as AI transformation for small businesses is noise dressed up as…
A ten-year-old product fulfillment and warehousing company, five locations across the Nashville…
Most owners who say they want to step back from their business never actually do it. The gap…
Most owners can describe how the business is doing in a sentence: "pretty good," "busy," "tight…
Deciding to scale is a strategic decision as much as an operational one, and plenty of owners make…
Most meeting advice doesn't survive contact with a real week. The habits that hold up under…
Radical candor gets thrown around as a leadership buzzword, usually stripped down to "just be more…
The claim that the average CEO reads sixty books a year gets repeated often enough in business…
Founder-dependency is easy to miss from the inside, because it usually feels like being needed…
A running list of the questions prospective clients ask most often, answered plainly. Coaching that…
Owners who start thinking about a sale usually start in the wrong place: revenue, margins, growth…
If you're a Christian running a business, you've probably felt this tension before you ever read a…
Accountability problems rarely come from people not caring. More often they come from nobody having…